Public service announcement:
nit-picking
No “k”.
(Also, oddly, it’s nitpick (no dash) but nit-picking (with a dash)).
This might interest you, for some of the technical details of filming: I met Keir Dullea tonight! - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
As to the transporter, warp drive and artificial gravity, Clarke once said, “When an elderly and very distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is quite likely correct. But when he says something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.”
That’s why they have Heisenberg compensators. Duh.
Heisenberg compensator. 
At least they kinda, sorta address it but I get the feeling that the writers think that the HUP is primarily a measurement problem and not really how the universe apparently works at a quantum level.
When asked by Time magazine in 1994, “How do the Heisenberg compensators work?” (scenic art supervisor) Michael Okuda replied, “They work just fine, thank you.”
Yes - and the fact that most of us spend every day of our lives walking around in a gravity field. It takes some effort to remember that (unless the station is spinning) everyone on DS9 ought to be floating instead of walking. It’s easier to swallow something that’s technically wrong but which is congruent with our everyday experiences. Hence artificial gravity, and sound effects in the vacuum of space - silent explosions would be factually correct, but they just feel wrong, so sounds effects are added for dramatic effect.
Artificial gravity is explored in Star Trek VI, where the gravity fails on the Klingon ship (mentioned upthread.)
And it’s at least acknowledged in the Voyager episode Learning Curve, where Tuvok surreptitiously turns up the gravity to whip some tubby crewmen into shape.
When you really think about what the transporter is actually doing, it’s creepier than hell. It’s not transporting consciousness at all. What it’s actually doing is murdering the original individual, and then creating an exact duplicate at the other end. The duplicate may think he/she has a continuous, uninterrupted consciousness, but it’s an illusion. The duplicate has the original person’s memories, but isn’t the original person. The original person no longer exists. When you step into a transporter, you die! So what if your newly-created identical twin clone lives on after your demise? You won’t know anything about it.
Star Trek could have had a lot of fun exploring the implications of that. (Why is the transporter even legal in the first place? Are there individuals/religious groups who refuse to use this “beneficial” technology? How do the major Earth religions see transporters - do they believe that the machine somehow transfers the transported person’s soul to the new body? Or have they given up on the doctrine of a non-corporeal soul altogether?) But that would be heading off into directions that would have upset a mass audience, so it’s understandable that they never brought up any of that on the show.
Second Chances.
Relevant and ongoing dope thread
I would agree that teleporters probably kill the original person. But as you’ll see there are plenty of people that disagree.
(And the reason I have to say “probably” is because IMO no current position on this is watertight. Every intuition about consciousness seems to fall apart in the limiting case).
That’s a great thread. Of course, it’s hard to say anything definitive about the Star Trek transporter because (in classic Star Trek fashion), it never works the same way twice. We’ve seen it fuse two people into one (Tuvox and Neelix into Tuvix), and split one person into two - and sometimes the duplicates are the same (Tom and Will Riker), and sometimes they’re opposites (good!wimpy!Kirk and evil!strong!Kirk). But at least the transporter felt like a machine, not magic, most of the time.
(And let’s not even mention the holosuites…)
[QUOTE=artemis;14881754The duplicate may think he/she has a continuous, uninterrupted consciousness, but it’s an illusion. The duplicate has the original person’s memories, but isn’t the original person. The original person no longer exists. When you step into a transporter, you die!
Dr. McCoy, is that you?
They were holding a conversation during transport in one of the TOS movies.
No, I mean that the creators gave this explanation and that it made it into the supplementary material. Official and canon are different concepts. Furthermore, fanon vs canon is a false dichotomy. Fanon means it was created by fans: something that has appeared in official publications cannot be fanon.
And what sets science fiction apart from fantasy is an attempt to explain what’s going on. Yes, it involves accepting pseudoscience. That’s why it’s called science fiction: it’s fictional science.
Star Trek makes an attempt at being plausible. Odo’s shapeshifting violates that. And the one thing that breaks suspension of disbelief more than anything is not the ridiculous, but the inconsistent.
Oh, and transporters do not quite work by disassembly and reassembly. That’s the official explanation, but that doesn’t match what we see onscreen.
If anyone is interested, I am now in season 4. Worf has joined the team!
Great addition in my opinion. Although the way he was brought in, on the edge of war with the Klingons. That was intense. And entertaining.
Having said that, I have to admit I sometimes have issues with the Klingons. They have a warrior culture (and I can agree how military culture can propel advancement in the sense that, as in our own world, military technology is key in dominating others), yet the Klingons often if not always insist on using bathlevs. A primitive weapon when dominating a universe.
Just a small nitpick.
P.S. Thanks for the nit pick regarding nit-picking Tom Scud.
You are without honor!
One could compare it to Japanese officers in the Second World War hauling katanas around.
Good point. But then they lost the war.
The katana didn’t really tip the war in their favor. It didn’t help against the atomic bomb.
The bathleths aren’t so bad. If your going to end up fighting in the tight confines of a starship, it makes sense to have a melee weapon. Trying to fix a bayonet to those little pistol things the Klingons had would look pretty silly.
But really, all military technology regresses in Star Trek. We almost never see a grenade, or a machine gun, phaser wounds are frequently non-lethal, what artillery fire we see is much less effective then 20th century artillery. Nobody drops a nuke or equivalent weapon. And you’d think in several hundred years we’d not only have improved on all those technologies, but have a bunch of new ones.
But having all battles decided in five seconds by who ever activates their automated heat-seaking super-bullets first doesn’t leave a lot of room for drama, so we get people dukeing it out with pistols and knives.
By the way. Is it ‘Jeb’hadar’, ‘Jem’hadar’ Or ‘Jemb’hadar’?
I have heard and even seen it spelled differently.
Can’t quite figure out which is the proper way to pronounce or spell it.
Good point.
Jem’Hadar. It was explicitly shown in an episode, “The Jem’Hadar.”
It’s pronounced how its spelled, BTW. The intruding B is just an artifact of having a short M and an H right next to each other, which is hard for some people to say.
I was going to say it must be a future episode, but then I saw it was the last episode of season 2. I guess I missed the episode name.
Thanks for the update.