Since they can travel FTL, changing matter to energy and back again shouldn’t be a problem.
It transmits a “matter stream” along an “annular confinment beam.” A few sources say that its’s a phased matter stream—which may act akin to plasma, and is somehow “out of touch” with normal matter—and possibly along a shallow level of subspace (aka “hyperspace”). This explains why the matter stream doesn’t seemingly interect with most matter or energy between the transporter and the transport site—although intense energy or dense matter will block a transport—but why the transporter doesn’t have an intersteller range. (You’re only using a modest amount of energy, to project something through a “shallow” layer of hyperspace. If you used more energy and/or went through a “deeper” layer of subspace, you’d get incredible range.)
The official Star Trek Technical Manual goes into the subject in further, clearer, detail.
Ranchoth
*Hey, I don’t make this stuff up. I just guess and rationalize about it.)
Has anybody mentioned Wesley’s nanites yet? (Four days since I read all the posts, too lazy to re-read)
Granted, he made them sentient, so some sort of deal would have to be made with them, but it might be worth it to have millions of little repairmen constantly restoring your ship to optimum working order.
And it shouldn’t be too difficult to make non-sentient ones, controlled by the engineering computer.
Maybe they DID use the nanites… it could explain why, no matter what happened to it, Voyager was always back in perfect condition at the beginning of an episode!
I stll want to know how they got replacement shuttles. They lost like a dozen of them over the course of the series, and you never saw more than one or two in the shuttle bay at one time. Do they have giant, shuttle -sized replicators?
They manufactured the Delta Flyer… maybe they manufactured all the shuttles as well. (Yes, I know I’m reaching.)
Well only half the people (it was only 2 people iirc, scotty lived and ensign disposable diden’t) in my example survived becase the system was jury-rigged on a damaged startship and left to sit far longer then expected so I can imagine they would have a much better success rate with a system designed for it.
I diden’t really think about energy use, or space which could be a problem. They managed to keep 2 people (well, one and a half) in it for some 80 years or something so I can’t imagine it uses THAT much power (expecially with 80 years of refinement to power generation).
Computer storage… I’ve not seen that episode of DS9 but there had to have been some odd situation causing it. You see several people beaming at once all the time and at least the enterprise has more then one transporter room (not sure how many total) which seems to imply that they use more then one at a time or why build the extras? backups?
As for space, I can think of advantages storing cargo in the transporter would have over a cargo bay even if it took up the same space. more efficent both in storage (you could litterally cram everything together) and retrieval (just punch in what you want and there it is) but i’m not sure if its worth the extra expense and power useage. This did get me thinking about why they even have a cargo bay though if they can replicate everything or nearly everything, and why they spend so much time transporting medical supplies and vaccines and such, but I guess thats a whole different issue.
Oh and as for prisiner’s rights… I can’t imagine it would be a problem becase for them it would be as if nothing happened, and truthfully I’d rather be sitting in stasis in a transporter then in that tiny little room for who knows how many weeks.
I can’t BELIEVE I forgot about the Nanites…I think they were even an off-the-shelf technology, too. (Just non-sentient without Wesley’s modifications)
And as for prisoner transport…they have conventional cryo-stasis available, as well. It seems to work perfectly, and there seems to be no difficulty in defrosting and reviving a frozen person. They’ve even mentioned using cryostasis units as a way of preserving seriously injuried patients until they can receive advanced medical care. Exactly three times. Over all the series’. That’s why it deserves a mention here.
Anyway, even if a transporter buffer doesn’t actually need much energy to operate, a glorified Frigidaire probably uses even less.
Of course, we’re not talking about the “stasis” units used on Voyager, that a person could apparently pull oneself from stasis under their own power, somehow.
Hey, wait a minute…that Voyager episode had enough stasis units for the entire crew. Where the hell did all THOSE things come from? Did they build them out of spare shuttlecraft parts?
Oh, and two more bits of tech…
•Tricobalt Weapons
Little is known about these things, except that they have a yield of " 22,000 TeraCochranes." A “Cochrane” is unit of subspace distortion. I don’t know WHY you’d use that to describe a weapon’s yield. It’s like saying “this warhead has a yield of 9.78 on the Richter Scale.” In any case, it makes a pretty big F**ing “boom.”
•On an episode of Voyage (“The Thaw”) Janeway mentions that Starfleet had, years ago, developed a technology that allowed a person’s body to be kept in stasis, but linked the person’s mind to a computer-generated enviroment, in order to keep it alert and active. I don’t know why you’d want to do this. But maybe—maybe—with a little work, you could use this to keep a terminally ill or injured person in stasis, but allow them to control a robotic or holographic “avatar” to interact with the real world.
Hey, Tracer…you started that “Ignored Treknology” web page, yet?