Evil Death. Play nice. Needless invective belongs in the Pit, not the Cafe.
You have been…warrrrrrrned.
– Uke, Cafe Society moderator
Do you know how big a transporter buffer is?
(Neither do I. But I’ll bet they’re at least as big as the patterns they store.)
Perhaps the transporter buffer isn’t used for cargo storage because of energy demands… maybe it takes more energy to keep a given mass in the transport buffer than it takes to haul it in the cargo bay.
In fact, if I remember the Next Gen tech manual correctly, the transporter doesn’t actually convert the mass to energy, but merely takes it apart. Thus, you’re STILL hauling the mass around, but with the added energy burden (and waste of data storage space) of holding it in the buffer.
Same with prisoners… in fact, if I was designing a starship, I’d have plain old metal doors on the brig! All that energy, wasted on locking a guy up…
ah, it’s the future, there’s energy everywhere.
I always took that to mean your basic requirements were taken care of, but if you wanted something special, you still had to pay for it some way. Also, I figure replicated things don’t have the same value as originals. Society might provide you with replicated food & clothes & generic housing, but most people aspire to be able to afford “real” clothes, artwork, furniture, eat “real” food in restaurants (like Sisko’s dad’s), etc.
Re: transporter buffers.
In a DS9 episode (I think it was “Our Man Bashir”?), several command officers were forced to stay in the buffers because of an accident on the runabout they were transporting from. IIRC, there were only five or six people involved, but their patterns alone took up every byte of available computer space on the station AND THEN SOME. The overflow was forced into the holodeck programs, thus driving the plot of the episode.
So that would probably eliminate the transporter’s use for prisoners, at least aboard your average starship. Once you put in more than two or so in, you’d probably need to empty out every bit of the remaining memory to accomodate them. As for cargo, that’s a little sketchier. IIRC, the reason why the crew members needed so much HD space was because of the complexity of the human brain. I wonder how much cargo you’d need to equal a human in that regard?
Besides the reasons stated above, wouldn’t storing people in pattern buffers violate humanitarian and civil rights laws? It would be sorta like if we were to start inducing chemical comas in prisoners today, just so we could stack 'em up, save space, save on the number of prison guards required, etc.
I’ve got an idea forming in my head.
Instead of sentencing convicts to time served or torture or whatever, let’s just implant the memory of incarceration, torture, Martha Stewart, what have you. Save alot of space and expense.
DS9 already did it with O’Brien in Hard Time.
Damn!
A nitpick: the DS9 crewmembers weren’t kept in the buffer, their patterns were actuallly saved in the computer. It was the mental patterns that took up so much space in DS9’s computers, IIRC. The physical patterns—the record of the bodies—seemed to fit entirely well in a holodeck subsystem.*
And I think the explaination of why a transporter buffer doesn’t require metric oodles of computer space to hold a pattern might be that it stores the information, it doesn’t record the information. Think of it as recording a radio broadcast on magnetic tape, versus trapping a soundwave inside a perfect hollow sphere, made out of a sound-reflecting material. You’re not recording the signal, you’re just juggling the information around until you do something with it.
Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t a dumb theory of mine.
*By the by, I think this means that if the original matter/energy of the transported officers wasn’t salvaged from the buffers and reformed using the saved patterns, it’s a fair arguement that the “original” crew members died, but were merely “replicated” from the saved patterns. But that’s neither here nor there.
If transporter beams can be saved, wouldn’t it make sense to use their storage ability as a hedge against death? Let’s say one of your red shirts die during a mission. No problem, you just beam a new copy of him out of the transporter memory bank. (John Varley explored the consequences of this type of technology in several of his stories.)
It does make sense, but I’m willing to bet that if it had ever come up the Federation would take some sort of moral stand against it, then ban the practice. Why not replicate the instances that created Tom Riker and ‘clone’ people?
Oddly enough, the ST game Elite Force had this as a solution to the “one-man-army” problem: all your weapons but the one you carried were stored in a transporter buffer, then replicated on demand. Why this didn’t mean you had unlimited ammo, I don’t know (other than that it would ruin the game mechanics).
According to the ST:TNG Tech Manual, transporters break down and store the data patterns for matter on the molecular level when dealing with inanimate objects, and on the quantum level when dealing with living creatures. Storing the position, velocity, and quantum state of every subatomic particle in an object is much more memory-intensive than merely storing the positions, velocities, and atomic composition of every molecule.
Oh – and I know you already know this, but they don’t use hard disks in the 24th century, they use isolinear chips. 
Exactly. Actually, you wouldn’t need a sickbay to treat major injuries…just keep a copy of the physical pattern stored (the holographic computer that stored five physical patterns on DS9 was about the size of an attache case.), and use it to overwrite the “damage” to the patient’s pattern when you run them through the transporter. As long as they’re not brain-dead or disintigrated, you wouldn’t have to store the neural pattern.
In fact, I just checked the [www.st-minutiae.com/academy/literature329/482.txt+“Our+man+bashir”+“Everywhere+else”&hl=en&ie=UTF-8]script](http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:A5L1BAQWDAoJ:[url) for “Our Man Bashir,” which says…
So, in short, it seems while the brain and mind has to be stored at the Quantum level, with a huge amount of computer power, the rest of the body can be easily stored in a modest computer. So, as long as you don’t have to recreate a brain, you can use the transporter to bring back the dead.
But, that doesn’t make much sense, either!
If that is actually the case (and it looks like it’s canon, since it was in an episode), than that means that anytime 5 or so people beam down (or up), than the entire ship’s computers would be needed for pattern buffering the mind part of them, and not just the transporter pattern buffer. Otherwise, and here’s why it is remarkably stupid, every time someone beams somewhere, they become brain dead.
Unless something else explains how they can transport an entire (consciousness included) human. Any takers on this? I see it as a major in my Trek understanding.
They avoided humans like the plague after the Captain reported, “Never rip a human’s shirt!”
According to my Technical Manual, the Pattern Buffer isn’t really a computer or a data storage device…it’s a “superconducting tokamak device” that actually physically stores the matter stream of the transported subject. Basically, it’s an electromagnetic “fish tank,” not a big “Zip disk.” (This is the biggest diagram of a Pattern Buffer I could find.)
Does it store all the quantum states of the matter involved, too? I’ve never looked too deep into this before.
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
Wait a minute. The Transporter is supposedly actually transmitting matter, not just transferring energy and information? How does this work when somebody beams to a planet or another space ship? Does the transporter just spit a big loogie of scrambled crewman across outer space?