I don’t have sources or cites to back me up, but as I recall old-style transporters, like before Kirk’s time, actually did use the disassemble-reassemble tech; the old body was broken down and a new one was created with the memories of the old. Folks found this ethically abhorrent so they kept working until they produced transporters that actually did move the person, matter and all, from one place to another. So “current” Trek transporters are incapable of making copies. Of course, there is still replicator technology, so that can of worms isn’t exactly closed.
I believe I read the above in the novel Federation, although I may be misremembering and it may not be canon even if I’m not.
This stuff doesn’t bother my enjoyment of the series. Like glowacks I’ve come to terms with the fact that the writers would just come up with technobabble to cover their asses if it ever came up. But it’s fun to speculate about.
Easier to just speculate that the transporter doesn’t disintegrate you at all, but the twinkling effect is hundreds of millions of tiny wormholes opening up, with their other ends at the target location. The matter that makes up your body isn’t being disintegrated and reconstituted, but actually moved through space and reconnected like a jigsaw puzzle being sent piece by piece.
Anyway, the episode where Picard, Ro, Guinan and Keiko get transporter-transformed into adolescent versions of themselves with their adult memories intact is probably the way to go. Screw up your adult body any way you like with drugs and gluttony and debauchery, then poof! - instant physical re-adolescence.
This makes the episode described in my OP stop making sense. Yes, it would easier if that’s how it worked, but that goes against what they say about transporters throughout the series.
In ‘Relics’ they have a technobabble reason why Scotty’s mate didn’t make it through, apparently his pattern was too degraded or somesuch. In other words, the ‘snapshot’ only lasts so long. Memory Alpha outlines the limitations here.
I’m not sure that’s right. If it was just her DNA they needed, all they’d need to do was rewrite her DNA, which in Star Trek for some reason has instant effects. And, of course, filter out the foreign antibodies, but removing contaminants during transport is a well-defined use of the technology.
Let me see if I can find the episode on Memory Alpha. Yip, Unnatural Selection. It seems you’ve actually gotten the two different proposed solutions mixed up. I’m right about how the hair DNA thing would work, but you’re right that they did at least propose to use a previous transporter pattern, and were only rebuffed in that Dr. Polaski never used a transporter.
Fortunately, using the new image is unimportant to your plan, as you would just keep around the DNA from when you were younger. This is probably why they did the whole treknobabble thing where Data and O’Brien talked about how dangerous and difficult it would be. Still, you wonder why they wouldn’t at least try it when they were getting close to death.
Then again, in the novel continuity, Dr. McCoy is 157 and still going strong after receiving some implants. Truly dying by old age seems rare.
Nerdish nitpick: latinum can’t be replicated. That’s the whole point of it, and what makes it valuable. (No one cares about the gold except as a containment vessel for the latinum, which is liquid.)
An example of the sort of hand-waving explanation I’d mentioned earlier. If Gold, Diamonds, or anything else valuable can be replicated, you need some sort of commodity that can’t if you’re going to keep a social system at all like ours.
I’d forgotten about latinum not being replicable. Can it be transported via transporter?
If there were remnants of cranial mounted lasers on their heads, which may have been the source of the flamage, they might have been mine. Some of them got away recently. You’d think mounting frikkin laser beams on the heads of flying monkeys wouldn’t be such a problem, but it is. The problem is that they’re on the heads of monkeys, which of course, want to play with them.
I’m off Monkeys. Too intelligent and yet too stupid. You can’t trust them to simply deliver the message. I’m not even going to go into the minions I lost over the whole “Hey, let’s give them something that makes their poo explosive!” dead end.
The problem with the STU is that in the name of The Show, they introduced far too many ‘neat tricks’ of Super Science involving the Transporter. If all of them held true, then any given person with a transporter could not only be physically perfect and immortal, but legion.
Seriously, do you not check your updates? We were specifically warned against mounting head-lasers on monkeys, flying and otherwise, in February 2002, after the Mossad incident.