Strange New Worlds season 2 - SPOILERS

[Umbran]

Yep. Transporters are the worst. Store a pattern when you’re healthy, well nourished, and hydrated. Beam down when you need to and have that person make the report. Beam them to nowhere after the mission. Have a neural implant that stores the memories and upload them so there’s no gaps. Need an army? Beam a thousand copies of your security team down with weapons and energy packs to spare.

Transporters, as described in various sources, don't work like that. The pattern isn't stored as "pure data". The "pattern buffer" stores your "matter stream" - the energy that was your body, with the information about you encoded in that stream. In effect, the material to make you, and the information to make you, are not separated. This is necessary, because the complete data needed to fully store a human is very, very large, even by Federation standards.

The transporter does keep a record so that upon transport it can filter out some things. But that's not a complete record of all the data needed to make you. In today's terms, it is more like a "checksum" they can use to remove that which doesn't match "you". But there's only so far this goes - your brain state is part of your pattern, but the transporter does not remove your memories when you come back, for instance.

And, as Dr. M'Benga has told us, you do have to rematerialize the person every once in a while - the pattern in the buffer will degrade otherwise. It took Scotty to figure out how to store patterns on very long timescales, and it is not recorded if he passed that trick back to Starfleet.

While there have been cases of duplicating people (hi, Thomas Ryker!) those have been accidents in which the transporter beam interacts with extremely large and powerful energy fields, beyond what can be harnessed on a starship, even by races like the Borg, who have some really big starships.

 

[MarkB]

Transporters, as described in various sources, don't work like that. The pattern isn't stored as "pure data". The "pattern buffer" stores your "matter stream" - the energy that was your body, with the information about you encoded in that stream. In effect, the material to make you, and the information to make you, are not separated. This is necessary, because the complete data needed to fully store a human is very, very large, even by Federation standards.

The transporter does keep a record so that upon transport it can filter out some things. But that's not a complete record of all the data needed to make you. In today's terms, it is more like a "checksum" they can use to remove that which doesn't match "you". But there's only so far this goes - your brain state is part of your pattern, but the transporter does not remove your memories when you come back, for instance.

And, as Dr. M'Benga has told us, you do have to rematerialize the person every once in a while - the pattern in the buffer will degrade otherwise. It took Scotty to figure out how to store patterns on very long timescales, and it is not recorded if he passed that trick back to Starfleet.

While there have been cases of duplicating people (hi, Thomas Ryker!) those have been accidents in which the transporter beam interacts with extremely large and powerful energy fields, beyond what can be harnessed on a starship, even by races like the Borg, who have some really big starships.

More than that, the pattern that's in the pattern buffer is so complete that it even remains conscious and aware. This can presumably be put on hold, as in the cases of M'Benga's daughter and Scotty, but during normal operation there is no interruption to consciousness throughout the process.

 

[Ryujin]

I miss the original matte painting.

Indeed.

 

[overgeeked]

More than that, the pattern that's in the pattern buffer is so complete that it even remains conscious and aware. This can presumably be put on hold, as in the cases of M'Benga's daughter and Scotty, but during normal operation there is no interruption to consciousness throughout the process.

Which is really weird considering it’s literally disintegrating you, ripping you apart molecule by molecule, converting your molecules to energy, sending that energy over there, and remotely recombining your molecules in precisely the right order to remake the uniqueness that is you. In the TNG era, transporters are also the basis for replicators. Program in a pattern and it can spit that pattern out as many times as it needs to while it has power. With technology so advanced that you have transporters and replicators, the whole “transporters don’t do that“ thing is a self-imposed limitation by the writers.

 

[MarkB]

Which is really weird considering it’s literally disintegrating you, ripping you apart molecule by molecule, converting your molecules to energy, sending that energy over there, and remotely recombining your molecules in precisely the right order to remake the uniqueness that is you. In the TNG era, transporters are also the basis for replicators. Program in a pattern and it can spit that pattern out as many times as it needs to while it has power. With technology so advanced that you have transporters and replicators, the whole “transporters don’t do that“ thing is a self-imposed limitation by the writers.

Yeah, but it's not doing that. It's channelling your matter through a matter stream that makes it behave like energy, but it's maintaining the interrelationships between your atoms at every stage of the process. There's no ripping apart involved.

Replicators use a different version of the process that individually transports atoms of various elements out of the mass buffers and assembles them into molecules, but it's not accurate down to the subatomic level so it can't create living beings.

Transporters never actually have to do that assembly process because they're transporting entire people and objects intact, so that's never an issue for them.

 

[Umbran]

...a self-imposed limitation by the writers.

I repeat - Star Trek is not, and never has been, a simulation. Technology in Trek does what it does to support story.

Transporters were originally put in Trek to make storytelling easier and cheaper - in terms of TV production costs, the transporters were cheaper and easier than shuttles, while opening up more weird science-fictional story premises than a shuttle does.

The folks who make Trek do not want to tell stories in which an empire prints soldiers en masse, so they don't have technology to do that in their fictional universe. Over time, the description of the technology has specifically shifted to avoid that result.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Which is really weird considering it’s literally disintegrating you, ripping you apart molecule by molecule, converting your molecules to energy, sending that energy over there, and remotely recombining your molecules in precisely the right order to remake the uniqueness that is you.

Dr. McCoy? Is that you?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Transporters, as described in various sources, don't work like that. The pattern isn't stored as "pure data". The "pattern buffer" stores your "matter stream" - the energy that was your body, with the information about you encoded in that stream. In effect, the material to make you, and the information to make you, are not separated. This is necessary, because the complete data needed to fully store a human is very, very large, even by Federation standards.

The transporter does keep a record so that upon transport it can filter out some things. But that's not a complete record of all the data needed to make you. In today's terms, it is more like a "checksum" they can use to remove that which doesn't match "you". But there's only so far this goes - your brain state is part of your pattern, but the transporter does not remove your memories when you come back, for instance.

And, as Dr. M'Benga has told us, you do have to rematerialize the person every once in a while - the pattern in the buffer will degrade otherwise. It took Scotty to figure out how to store patterns on very long timescales, and it is not recorded if he passed that trick back to Starfleet.

While there have been cases of duplicating people (hi, Thomas Ryker!) those have been accidents in which the transporter beam interacts with extremely large and powerful energy fields, beyond what can be harnessed on a starship, even by races like the Borg, who have some really big starships.

This guy transports!

(But yes well-explained.)

 

[Ryujin]

Weird that they made the Kalar an entire group, when the originating episode heavily implied it was a singular creature.

 

[Umbran]

Weird that they made the Kalar an entire group, when the originating episode heavily implied it was a singular creature.

Memory Alpha notes that in original scripts it was used to refer to the species, but through revisions how it was presented became more ambiguous about whether it referred to the species or an individual.