Star Trek TNG had one too. Unlike the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, the Star Trek version was just a screwdriver. Or at least that’s all they used it for on the show, from what I recall.
It might have been an intentional nod to Doctor Who.
A perfectly cromulent descriptive insult. I shall hurl it with impunity (with permission).
People have been seen moving/waving their arms while still in transport, or talking. Seems like if you don’t stand PERFECTLY still, you’ll come back wrong. WI you walk halfway off the pad at the instant of dematerialization? Only half of you gets transported?
In the TOS era (at least until Strange New Worlds retconed it). You could only beam to or from the transporter room (or cargo bay which presumably had its own transporter). Beaming directly to Sick Bay or intraship was a function of 24 Century Trek and to show advances in technology.
I would guess 32nd Century ships in the Discovery era don’t bother with transporter rooms. Discovery itself has one because it was built in the 23rd Century and needed one.
Why they don’t care about air is the Annular Confinement Beam which kind of preps the area before you beam in so you don’t combine with anything.
Use as you see fit, mortal casing of barely organized aerobes.
Even if you keep arms and legs perfectly still (whatever that means at the scale of atomic disintegration), the body is in constant motion; not only the heart, lungs, and circulatory and lymphatic fluid, but there is a constant flow of intracellular machinery and intercellular signaling. So, unless the transporter can somehow (magically) track and compensate for motion going down to at least the sub-molecular level, it is going to do major full body disruption every time it starts the dematerialization cycle. How it prevents all the fluids from splooshing out onto the transporter pad during this process, which takes several seconds between initialization and full rendition of the corpus to the ‘matter stream’ and data storage buffer, is completely unexplained.
Stranger
Teams of software engineers had many debates on which dematerializes first - the fluids or the solids.
Same way the “matter stream” slots 1028 atoms into place like a Pachinko machine, must be “force fields”.
I wonder if a “warp” transporter would be a more viable technology in the Trekverse. Instead of being dematerialized, with all the hypothetical, potential, and actual horrors that that might entail, just open a warp portal to your destination, walk through, you’re there with absolutely no mussed hairs or futzed brain cells. [Yes I know how the Stargates work in that franchise’s milieu-as in note they are dematerialized there too]
Except for Discovery, which has an inexplicable abundance of robots.
At the cellular level that is a pretty vague distinction, and at the molecular level almost none at all. But the real problem is as soon as you remove enough mass to significantly reduce the density of pressure-containing endothelium or the integrity of the cellular membranes, the body is essentially just going to explode into a mass of cytoplasm and fluids.
Ah, “force fields”; the thing that keeps people in cells until they ‘short it out’ using a bit of silver thread from their belt or a clueless security redshirt. Yeah, I put a lot of trust in “force fields” to hold my guts in place while some particle disrupter rips the skin from my body one atom at a time.
Stranger
The Merchant of Venice is required reading at Transporter School.
That’s the software versus hardware debate.
Wetware versus firmware.
Stranger
I’m now imagining early tests in this technology, starting with fungi or houseplants or something, then trying actual animals and suddenly discovering that they programmed the mammal bits of it, but not the other things inside it, like stomach contents and poop. It just seems like something engineers would forget.
The mess…!
Or lungs full of shit…
You know how social acceptance can be one of the bigger hurdles to new technology? How many centuries do you think this took?
“Uh, no way, not using that, my neighbour’s uncle’s best friend’s niece’s roommate took part in a study, and they had to surgically remove his lunch from his heart.”
In principle, even with TOS tech, they could have transported from the bridge to the planet; it just would have taken two legs: First beam the crew from the bridge to the transporter room, and then from the transporter room to the planet. But, while the transporter is much cheaper than launching a spaceship, it’s not free, and so it makes more sense to just walk to the transporter room.
The TNG transporters that could go directly from bridge to planet probably did more or less the same thing, with two legs, just in a more streamlined process. And they made it cheaper, so it was at least sometimes worthwhile to do point-to-point transports. But it was still more expensive than a hub-to-point transport, and so in many circumstances it was still sensible to walk to the transport room.
And of course, in any case, it’s easier and cheaper yet to have transporter equipment at both ends. Which is why, when they’re going from one friendly ship to another, they usually go from one transporter room to the other.
Transporter rooms also give you a visual check that yes, Phil remembered his tricorder this time. For that matter, I doubt everybody is packing heat while on duty or in their quarters, so they’d have to stop by the armory on the way to the transporter room to get their shootin’ irons. Another visual check. Might as well have a room for such things.
Or–just a thought–they could have a function in the transporter that appropriately clothes, equips, and arms the landing party with whatever they might need, even if they were just standing naked in the sonic shower a minute before, which the operator could detect by a pre-transport scan. I mean, if the transporter operator can ‘scan’ a person down to the atomic level from thousands of miles away through interplanetary space, there really is no privacy anywhere, right?
The existential horror and lack of any kind of boundaries or personal security anywhere in the Star Trek narrative universe continues to grow. This is a place where nobody should live.
Stranger
I always assumed the point of the transporter ‘room’ was specialized equipment and power needs - not to mention little pads that go ‘poof’ at just the opportune time.
I had thought it might have forcefields or cells to use in case of quarantine or attack, in case something malignant arrived unexpectedly.