You are correct. But Shodan was onto something. Why not just beam down a shitload of bricks or someother building material. So they duplicate, does that mean you can’t build a shelter with them? Or beam down tons of blankets. Same thing, who cares if they duplicate? Just get out of the wind!
Are you mad? Shelters built out of the Evil Bricks would fall on you, and Evil Blankets would strangle you. And the Good Bricks and Good Blankets would be too wimpy to help you!
Presumably, an explanation could be given based on Conservation of Energy.
If the transporter is really a duplicator, it creates a duplicate being at another location. That’s a huge amount of energy needed. Assuming a being with a mass of 180 pounds (82kg), the energy needed is incredible (e=mc^2, even in Star Trek). So if it’s a duplicator, where would this energy come from?
But if it’s strictly a transporter, than you could make the claim that the energy comes from the original being; their mass is converted into energy, then that energy is broadcast across space along with the control information containing the exact patterns of that being, and then the receiver converts that energy back into the mass of the being, following that pattern info.
(This still seems beyond several laws of current physics. For example, the amount of energy transmitted, in the few seconds the transporter takes – that transmitter would be blazing way more than the local sun for that time! But it does at least pay lip service to one of the major laws of physics.)
And you might still slip the ‘resurrection’ trick in with this explanation: use the dead body (assuming it’s available and still roughly the same mass (no significant decay yet)) for the transporter energy, but use the pattern info from a previous transporter trip to reconstruct the original, living body. But that assumes the transporter pattern information is saved in memory somewhere. And that would be a very large file to keep somewhere. Could Starfleet afford to do this on a regular basis?
I read recently that Prince Harry made noise about not abandoning his men if they were sent to Afghanistan. The prevailing opinion from “knowing Army sources” was that it didn’t matter how much he complained, he wasn’t going, for the reasons stated above. His presence would escelate attacks, and God forbid he be captured or killed.
One of the stupid sci-fi “inventions” I really :rolleyes: at is the meal-in-a-pill.
“Mmmm… That’s one great meal! I’m sure glad we invented pills instead of just using the food that provided the nutrients for them in the first place. Too bad we have to take a dozen of these horse pills each meal to get enough nutrients and roughage, though. And I’m still hungry. They don’t have enough volume for my human stomach.”
They’re presumably like pemmican. “If you’re still hungry, drink some water. It’ll expand in your stomache.”
Also, if you watch the 5th Element, you know that the pills will expand if microwaved for about 2 seconds.
Most of them were new, but some of them were those original swords from the 13th century. Those were the heirlooms Raguleader was talking about.
So, just how good were the mass-produced versions? I mean, it’s possible they could have been made to acceptable battlefield standards, but then, “Made In Japan” wasn’t exactly the mark of quality workmanship back then that it is now.
Isn’t the US military working on a combat ration that fits an entire days worth of nutrients into something the size of a deck of cards? The military would be one the few markets for a food pill.
There was also Damon Knight’s The People Maker (expanded and reprinted as A For Anything.) I tend to agree with reviews that say while the premise was good, the execution was flawed. And it’s really dark, like a lot of Knight’s writing. I gotta say, the Gismo (well, really what Knight thinks will happen after the introduction of the Gismo) is poorly conceived.
Ah, but when it comes to sword making, the Japanese were pretty much always top notch. An uncle of mine had a Japanese sword he picked up after the war (IIRC, he was part of the first occupation forces) that according to him had been reworked to enable it to fit in the cockpit of a plane (it dated, I think, originally from the 1600s) and you couldn’t tell that anything had been done to it. Sadly, instead of giving it to me, he sold it at a garage sale for a mere $300. 
About 2 months ago I examined one that my friend’s dad brought back from his time on Okinawa, he obtained it “the hard way” as he put it. :eek: Anyway, it was beautiful. The quality was quite evident. Odd, the tsuba was much smaller than I expected.
Maybe it was actually a Bsaritone? 
ducks
Usually, no where near the standards of earlier swords, and occasionally quite poor. The Internet meme that all katana are fabulously forged, high-quality swords turns out to be not accurate. Go figure. This is not surprising, since the shin-gunto were being made during WWII – when the Japanese military had better things to spend their time and steel on than superior-quality swords.
As explained here:
I suppose the über-katana with its magical abilities to, say, deflect bullets or cut through machine guns or tanks would qualify as “poorly conceived movie technology.”
Well played, sir.