[net.sf-lovers] Fun with Transporters

ddw@cornell.UUCP (David Wright) (08/02/83)

From: ddw (David Wright)
To: net-sf-lovers

Hey, in the Star Trek universe, the transporter \could/ store people,
at least temporarily.  Remember "Day of the Dove?"  The Klingons force
Kirk to beam them up to the Enterprise.  Kirk craftily presses some panic
button on his communicator and all the Enterprise people appear in the
chamber first, exit, and then the Klingons appear once the Enterprise
folks have the heavy guns trained on 'em.  (Arguments that the Klingons
were beamed up in a separate pass do not hold water, as they would most
certainly have scattered, knowing they'd been had, if they saw all the
Enterprise people beaming up first.)

Trying to tie "Star Trek" to reality is, of course, silly, but these
arguments can be fun.

                                 David Wright

                                 {vax135|decvax|ihnss}!cornell!ddw
                                 ddw.cornell@udel-relay
                                 ddw@cornell

eric@aplvax.UUCP (08/02/83)

	All right, I admit it. I had forgotten about "Day of the Dove"s
trick with the transporter. It does seem that you can delay the transporter
effect, and hence, "store" the intermediate information. 

	But wait, maybe there is another solution. You can store the
person's pattern, but it takes lots of (memory, circuitry, knowledge crystals).
This effectively means that the system can only be used in a temporary fashion.

	Or better yet, maybe the way the pattern is stored in an extremely
volatile device. So maybe storage time is only a few minutes (has to be at
least a few minutes, I seem to remember several episodes where Scotty
sweats over the transporter board trying to beam some one up).

	Don't you just love trying to come up with scientific explanations
for something that was done strictly for dramatic effect?

						eric
						...!seismo!umcp-cs!aplvax!eric