Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 Viewing (Spoilers)

[Maxperson]

They have used the transporter buffer to suspend transport, for a short time, in order to do things like deactivate the weapons of incoming people. The idea of a long term suspension was a really bad idea. They could have mitigated it somewhat by perhaps saying that it would require an extraordinary amount of computer power to "maintain pattern cohesion", or some other sciencey sounding guff. That would explain why Scotty could do it; he had an entire ship's computer to play with.

M'Benga did it long term in this series with his daughter using only the medical bay transporter. It doesn't seem to take much of the computer power.

 

[MarkB]

And not just transporters. You'd have Scotty say something like, "If I just hook up the phase translocater to the warp coils while playing solitaire, I think we can hit warp 45." And then he succeeds, yet nobody keeps the upgrades or puts them on future ships.

They've done that sort of thing with energy output, speed, transporters, sensors, weapons and more. If Star Fleet scientists actually followed up on any of this, ships would have been 5x more powerful than Picard's Enterprise decades earlier.

One thing I liked in the TNG episode Relics where Scotty is brought back is that we do get a mention of one of those clever fixes being still in use.

In Star Trek IV Spock and Scotty have to come up with a way to recrystallise dilithium, which was hitherto impossible. And in Relics Geordi explains that the crystals in the Enterprise-D's warp reactor are being periodically recrystallised even while in active use.

 

[pukunui]

One thing I liked in the TNG episode Relics where Scotty is brought back is that we do get a mention of one of those clever fixes being still in use.

In Star Trek IV Spock and Scotty have to come up with a way to recrystallise dilithium, which was hitherto impossible. And in Relics Geordi explains that the crystals in the Enterprise-D's warp reactor are being periodically recrystallised even while in active use.

Didn't Scotty survive by putting himself long-term in the transporter pattern buffer as well?

 

[James Gasik]

Didn't Scotty survive by putting himself long-term in the transporter pattern buffer as well?

Yes, I believe that was TNG: "Relics". His ship had encountered one of the Sphere Builder's systems, as I recall.

 

[Ryujin]

M'Benga did it long term in this series with his daughter using only the medical bay transporter. It doesn't seem to take much of the computer power.

Yes, that's my point. The writers not limiting transporter use by some means like a massive computer load, or progressively large power requirements, set the stage for abuse. The fewer the limits, the more why ask, "Why don't they just use the transporter to..."

 

[James Gasik]

While we haven't seen one in awhile, transporter mishaps do happen, and I can understand why overriding the safety protocols is literally a Hail Mary play. Granted, there are still times when, yes, you might as well try a transporter and they don't, but it's at least plausible why it's not your one stop shop quick fix.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I agree with most of what you said there, except for this. James Doohan WAS Scotty. Saying he does Scotty better than Scotty, is like saying some actor in the future could be better at being you than you.

It's very much not "like" that lol.

Scotty was not ever a real person. That's genuinely important to remember because clearly there's seemingly some confusion here, given your insistence he is the same as a real person.

He was a character on a TV show

That's different from being a real person.

If I'm not real to you, just another fictional character because I'm a poster on the internet, well, I can't help you there!

But having an actual Scottish accent, rather than... whatever Doohan was doing... plus being a more capable actor (which, sorry, he clearly is imho), and just being more convincing as a "highly inventive, paradigm-shifting engineer" adds up. The first person to play a role is not always the best! (Even ignoring examples with pre-existing characters, i.e. all the Marvel, GoT, etc. examples, c.f. Becky from Roseanne, Ann from Arrested Development, Reggie from Riverdale, Carol (Ross' ex-wife) from friends, and so on.)

It's fine to prefer Doohan, I mean, some people prefer Aunt Viv 1.0 in The Fresh Prince (I am one of them), but you actually can say a new actor in the role is better at it than the originator, because the role is a role not a person. Hell with Shakespeare I am very confident there are even parts written for specific actors at the time that have been played by other actors "better" truly countless times since.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Pretty much anyone could do me better than me. I find myself wholly unbelievable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

M'Benga did it long term in this series with his daughter using only the medical bay transporter. It doesn't seem to take much of the computer power.

We don't really know that. It could well be that it was taking up some meaningful fraction of the computer's power - like even if it was just 1% or 2% that's significant as a long-term drain on processing ability.

Also it either limits potential plots or opens up a big plothole - if the Enterprise loses power, and/or the computer is disabled, anything in the buffer should be lost. It's like storing vital information in live RAM - you can do it, every computer does it all day every day, but if you didn't also write it to somewhere more permanent, you're going to lose it as soon as you lose power (can't remember if the Enterprise lost power whilst Rukiya was in the buffer, I suspect if she'd stayed in there longer-term this would have come up - M'Benga is much more interesting when his main damage is "I'm a somewhat PTSD'd war vet who is also technically a murderer and shockingly badass at melee combat" than < ridiculous Estuary accent for no reason >"Me daughter is stuck in the transpor'er buffer innit").

 

[Maxperson]

We don't really know that. It could well be that it was taking up some meaningful fraction of the computer's power - like even if it was just 1% or 2% that's significant as a long-term drain on processing ability.

A drain that large would have been noted by other stations and he would have been found out long before he was.

Also it either limits potential plots or opens up a big plothole - if the Enterprise loses power, and/or the computer is disabled, anything in the buffer should be lost. It's like storing vital information in live RAM - you can do it, every computer does it all day every day, but if you didn't also write it to somewhere more permanent, you're going to lose it as soon as you lose power (can't remember if the Enterprise lost power whilst Rukiya was in the buffer, I suspect if she'd stayed in there longer-term this would have come up - M'Benga is much more interesting when his main damage is "I'm a somewhat PTSD'd war vet who is also technically a murderer and shockingly badass at melee combat" than < ridiculous Estuary accent for no reason >"Me daughter is stuck in the transpor'er buffer innit").

This is true.