Dubyans… DUBYANS!!!
I can see it now, their nefarious efforts to take over the galaxy by reversing the polarity of the tachyon emitters in the polling booths… Heeheheehee!
I love you, SPOOFE.
They had an episode about the Dubyans once!
Remember the race that kidnapped Geordi because he was so smart and he could make their ships go really fast?
[sub]oh wait…that’s the Pakleds[/sub]
Originally posted by Max the Immortal
That sounds suspiciously like the main weapon that was on GlitterBoy armor in the Palladium: Rifts roleplay setting.
We look for things.
If it (the railgun) had a name, I don’t recall, and I’m too lazy to go look thru my gazillion books for …
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Rob’t Heinlein.
and TANSTAAFL to you all.
Fenris…
Where No Man Has Gone Before!! Yeah, I DID see that! I just forgot that the whole plot got started 'cuz they tried to cross the “galactic barrier”… in my mind, it just translated as “some random energy field that does funky stuff”.
Speaking of which… is there any scientific theory that currently states that there would be a “galactic barrier” (some form of dark matter or something?) encircling the galaxy? 'Cuz this was a concept used in the Star Wars series The New Jedi Order (which, so far, has completely sucked major ass… the first book killed off Chewbacca!).
Ethilrist…
Well, just place a transporter beacon every 100 miles (you’d only need 5,865,696,000,000 of 'em to span the galaxy… and with the vaunted, almighty replicators, that shouldn’t be too hard, right? :D)
Only 100 miles, huh? Is there any canon or official source for that? (It would be a great counter to the “Enterprise can just beam a bomb aboard the ISD bridge” argument… :D)
Okay, I’ll give the points. Ten points to Cap’n Crude! Make a note of it. The Glitter Boy power armor suit, one of the lamest named power armor suits of all time, is armed with an 867 lb. rail-shotgun. Simply referred to as the “Boom Gun”, its sheer firepower and coolness (c’mon: a giant rail-shotgun!) easily make up for the fact that it, too, has a somewhat lame name. Sigh If only they’d given the gun and the PA suit a better name…
More like 5,865,696,000,000,000 (or actually 5,878,000,000,000,000).
Whoops… thanks, MEB… I miscounted the number of zeros (and I rounded off C).
Yeah, but that’s no big deal. Transporters can create stuff from nothing at a distance (they can zap a turkey dinner into existance on a planet, for instance).
Therefore: You make your first transporter. You feed it the plans to create more transporters. You beam a new transporter into existance at (limit of transporter - fudge factor for safety). Program the new transporter to do the same. Repeat ad infinitum.
Fenris
SPOOFE:
Well, just off the top of my head (and at the risk of straying from the OP), it seems reasonable to think of a galaxy as a stellar accretion disk on a gigantic honkin’ scale. And if you think of it that way, it further seems reasonable that there would be a scaled-up analog to the Oort Cloud enveloping the galaxy.
But there’s no reason to think it would have any special converting-humans-into-gods properties.
(And for that matter, even the existence of the Oort Cloud around our solar system has yet to be proved.)
Is that the number to create a line of beacons across the galaxy? If so, in order to travel anywhere in the galaxy, rather than anywhere along a single line of travel, you’d need just a few more than that…
Actually, the range on the transporters is about 30,000 km, but they are speed of light, not intstantaneous. That makes them impratical for interstellar travel.
Are you sure? Were they limited to the speed of light in Trek Classic? I really, really, thought they were instantaneous.
Fenris
Fen, thanks for the info (I love picking up random tidbits of info like this).
RE: Transporter speed…
From Startrek.com’s definition of “transporters”…
No mention about “speed”, but doesn’t energy travel at the speed of light? Anyway… yes, that definition DOES come from the original series. Perhaps transporters haven’t changed much since then, aside from a (slight) amount of reliability.
Ummm…remember the Excelsior? In STVI? According to the novelizations, he was supposed to get that command shortly after doing that training mission in STII, but it got iced because of his participation in Spock’s rescue.
Actually, ripping off an old time travel method is good…that way they don’t have to keep inventing yet another way to do it, thus stretching credibility more and more. How many different ways are there now?
Guardian of Forever, slingshot effect, Orb of Time, at least a half dozen more…it gets ridiculous.
In one of the STTNG episodes, a vengeful Ferengi used a warp-boosted transporter to move far beyond the transporter’s normal range. So ordinarily the transporter is speed-of-light. They made clear that the warp boosted version was like playing Russian roulette, so hideously dangerous that you’d have to be suicidal to attempt it.
Oh, and another thing ST ought (should) have done: Unless it’s part of the plot that a planet has life on it, don’t automatically have the planet have a breathable atmosphere. Non-life supporting planets are a hell of a lot more common than ones with Earth-normal atmospheres. It isn’t going to break the special effects budget to have the characters wear respirators, for crying out loud! Possibly the worst example was a DS9 episode where Dax and I think Kira were inside an asteroid that just happened to have oxygen-filled caverns(!!!)
Well, in DS9 the Dominion had transporter technology with a range of 3 light years (a Vedek who’d turned to the dark side used one to send Major Kira from DS9 to Empok Nor at Dukat’s behest). I would assume (although the time period was not covered in DS9) that any imaginary Trek timeline would have the Feds pretty quickly figuring out how to improve their transporters similarly.
By the by, I shoulda given my thanks to Fiver, not Fenris… sorry. I just saw the “F” in the poster name and came to the conclusion…
Anyway, just wanted to give credit where credit’s due. Carry on.