From: jsbell@acs.ucalgary.ca (Joshua Bell)
Date: 2 Dec 93 17:42:07 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.tech
Subject: Mini-FAQ: Transporters and Replicators

Warning! Spoilers for some 5th and 6th season TNG episodes follow.



		     Transporter & Replicator Mini-FAQ
			(updated October 26th, 1993)
                                                                 
At least, answers to common questions as theorized by me, and based on
canonical (see note at the end of this FAQ) and quasi-canonical
information.

......................................................................

"How does the transporter work?"

While there is no absolute canonical answer, we can piece one
together from various clues, that fits nearly everything seen
on-screen, and in the TNG Tech Manual.

We have some evidence of the inner workings of transporters, but
not much. They employ Heisenberg compensators, pattern buffers,
Biofilters, matter streams, confinement beams, and matter-energy
converters, and phased matter. As for what they do, we know that
you are conscious during transport (STII:WoK, TNG "Realm of
Fear"), but can also be held in stasis (TOS "Day of the Dove",
TNG "Relics").  Further, while in transport, you appear whole to
yourself.

I hypothesize that the Annular Confinement Beam first locks onto,
then disassembles the subect into phased matter, causing it to
take on a very energy-like state akin to plasma. The matter
stream is then fed into the pattern buffer, piped through
waveguide conduits to one of the beam emitters on the hull of the
starship, and then relayed to a point on the ground where the ACB
reconstructs the subject.

....

"Excuse me, Annular Confinement Beam?"

Yes. The ACB is where the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty!" comes
from.  The beam serves two purposes: The first is to maintain a
"lock" on the subject, so the transporter knows what to beam out,
and what to leave behind. The second purpose is to do the actual
transporting, whilst keeping the subject in one piece
subjectively.

....

"How does the transporter know what to take and what to leave?"

In TOS "The Enterprise Incident", the ship's scanners are able to
differentiate a Vulcan from all of the Romulans aboard another
ship.  They are very sensitive, but also take a great deal of
time. In many episodes, this sensitivity is not used. However, to
scan at that level of resolution would take perhaps far longer
than the crew has.

In any case, the ACB generators are able to scan the target
subject, and either using some best-guessing or asking the
Transporter Chief, decide what should be transported with the
subject.

As one r.a.st.tech poster put it, "One to beam up, hold the bunny
slippers." :)

....

"So what is this pattern thing?"

The pattern buffer is a cyclotron-like tank (TNG:TM) which holds
the whirling matrix of phased matter in the ACB while the subject
is beamed out and beamed in. In order to keep track of where
every part of the subject is, the computer constructs a pattern
to keep track of what bits of the stream end up where.

An analogy would be the [left->right->left&down]->top pattern a
television electron gun follows to paint a picture on the
phosphors of the screen. The television (we're assuming an old
analog no-frills model) doesn't know and can't possibly store the
information needed to construct a one-hour program, but it has a
pattern, and uses a modulated matter (electron) stream to do it.

In TNG "Lonely Among Us", Picard is recovered from being beamed
away as pure energy. The computer is able to reconstruct Picard
by using the pattern it had stored, working with the phased
matter stream that Picard's energy state itself supplied. Since
the pattern was pre-transport, the reformed Picard had no
memories of the excursion.

....

"So what is a Heisenberg Compensator?"

In physics, the Heisenberg Principle states that you cannot know
both the position of a subatomic particle and its momentum to a
precise degree. The more you know about one, the less you know
can about the other.

This comes into play when you consider that to know where
everything is coming from and going to, you pretty much have to
know near-exactly where everything is. By the 24th century,
evidently, thats no longer a problem. The Heisenberg Compensators
are probably used to keep everything in the matter stream exactly
where it should be.

....

"How does that Biofilter gadget work?"

The Biofilter is a good clue as to how the transport patterns
work.  The filter looks for elements of the pattern which aren't
found in normal beings/equipment, or those of known viruses and
bacteria. It can simply erase those parts of the pattern, and
those parts of the matter stream won't beam back in.

In TNG "Unnatural Selection", Pulaski is restored from an aged
state by the use of the Biofilter. If Pulaski's altered DNA could
be tagged as unwanted, the pattern could be tweaked to restore
the DNA (its pretty much all the same molecules anyway, just
shuffle some base-pairs around). As for her recovering
instantly... well, its a TV show.

....

"What is pattern degredation?"

The pattern is probably highly complex. Pattern degredation
occurs because the Annular Confinement Beams aren't perfect, even
with the help of the Heisenberg Compensators. The matter stream
comes out of alignment with the computer's pattern predictions
for where things should be. Obviously, this is a bad thing.

According to the TNG Tech Manual, a subject can be suspended in
transport for up to 420 seconds before the degredation is too
severe to attempt to reform the transportee. They push close to
this limit in "Realm of Fear".

In TNG "Relics", we see that by keeping the transport controller
locked in a diagnostic loop, pattern degredation is kept to a
minimum - even with an old-style transporter, only 0.003% of the
pattern was lost after 75 years in stasis.

In TNG "Realm of Fear", the most extraordinary development is the
reconstruction of the lost crew, and their appearance as the
giant slugs while in transport. I suspect that the phased-matter
"bugs" which reside in the plasma environment act as a natural
ACB, maintaining the pattern of those "lost" in transport. The
computer is able to use the Biofilter to rebuild the patterns and
restore the individuals.

....

"Where are you during transport?" 

Inside the ACB. TNG "Realm of Fear" shows what it looks like -
lots of blue and silver sparkles. If you mean from an outside
observer's point of view, you're either in one of the pattern
buffers, or in transit to the beaming coordinates. In TOS "The
Gamesters of Triskelion", Kirk and crew are lost during
transport. In the technobabble that follows, Spock and McCoy
discuss whether recovering the lost crewmembers from the
transport beam, thought to be zipping away from the Enterprise,
is possible. (This could be TOS "The Tholian Web"; if anyone
knows, drop me a line.) This means that if the beam was somehow
suspended, a smart computer could reconstruct the pattern and
beam you back in. This might be what happened in TNG "Realm of
Fear". If the ACB environment is similar to a plasma field, the
bugs could act as stabilizers. Long shot, but hey.

....

"So was Scotty conscious for 75 years?" (TNG "Relics")

Nope, or he would have starved - if your brain is working, your
heart must be pumping blood, and it needs energy from somewhere.
There are three possibilities for how this was accomplished:

1) All transporters have an optional "statis" switch, that locks
the pattern of the subject during transport. In other words, they
are frozen on a quantum level.

2) Old-style transporters, as seen in TOS, always transported the
subject under stasis. From watching the show, we can see the two
stages in a beamout. First, a sparkly pattern appears over the
chest of the subject, and spreads to cover them. They are
sometimes seen to move during this process. Then they start to
have these yellow blobs appear as they fade out. They don't move
during this second stage. We can speculate that there's a stasis
field employed for some reason (technological limitations,
safety, etc) during the actual transport stage with old
technology.  This style of transporter was present on the Jenolan
("Relics"), but is now obselete.

3) Putting the transport controller in a diagnostic loop imposes
stasis on the subject, as a byproduct of the process by which
degredation is minimalized.

Choice (3) is the most appealing to me.

....

"What happens to the air when you beam in or beam out?"

It is likely that during the beam-out process, air simply
diffuses into the space previously occupied by the subject under
transport.  This happens slowly enough that there would be no
pop, or any other sound, except perhaps a small hum or tinkling
noise, depending on the dynamics of air interacting with the ACB.

As for beaming in, the ACB lock on the target site probably gives
the air a gentle "shove" out of the way, again with minimal
noise.

....

"How can you transport without a transporter at the receiving
end?"

According to the TNG Tech Manual, the Enterprise hull sports
emitter array pads at various sites on its surface. They utilize
"long-range virtual-focus molecular imaging scanners" to handle
remote disassembly of the subject, and facilitate reassembly.
The ACB is tightly focused onto the target area from the ship.
This is limited - in the TNG era, 40,000 km is the safe range for
transport.

....

"So why in TOS episodes/TFS films did they beam from transporter
room to transporter room?"

Intraship transport in the TOS era was not very reliable. Likely,
when two compatible transport systems were available, the surface
emitters could "interlock", and the pattern buffers would
synchronize. One transport system would handle the
dematerialization, and hand off the ACB to the receiving end for
the rematerialization. This is much safer and likely requires
less energy, and can be used to get around certain environmental
difficulties. (TNG "Realm of Fear")

....

"What happened at the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture
then, if its so safe?"

When the power on the receiving end of the transport failed, the
transport computer on the Enterprise was unable to maintain the
pattern integrity of the matter stream. This is akin to
catastrophic degredation of the pattern. Kirk said "Boost your
matter gain, we need more signal!" - perhaps indicating that the
ACB could have been used to reconstruct the pattern. In any case,
the hand-off appeared to have been nearly complete when the
transportees began reforming on the pad.  Since the Enterprise
could not handle the transport, the matter stream was sent back
to Starfleet HQ, in the hopes that enough of the pattern remained
in the ACB to reconstruct them at the sending site. It wasn't,
and the subjects died shortly thereafter.

....

"And why can't Trills be transported?" (TNG "The Host")

Odan said that transport would kill him. Whether or not transport
will be lethal to the "revised Trill" seen in DS9 or not isn't
yet known.  However, accepting Odan at his word, there are a
couple of explanations.

The first is that, not knowing that Trill are a joined species,
the Biofilter might identify the slug part as a parasite and
delete the pattern, killing both the host and the symbiont. If
this is true, then simply by turning off/adjusting the Biofilter,
Trills can transport like anyone else.

The second is that some part of the symbiont would be damaged by
the transporter effect. Perhaps it operates on a sub-quantum
level, or makes use of some substance which causes the
transporter to malfunction, or something of that nature. In that
case, there is no easy fix.

....

"Why can't you be transported through shields?"

If you could be transported through shields, they'd be pretty
lousy shields. Just transport a bomb or boarding party over.

....

"But what about the time O'Brien used the shield frequencies..."
(TNG "The Wounded")

Shields must allow some energy through to allow sensors to
operate. To be safe, these frequencies are cycled, allowing
sensor windows. By knowing the shield cycles, and the right
frequencies, it is be possible to adjust the transporter to work
at those few open frequencies, and slip past the shields.

Of course, if the destination ship detects you trying to beam
through, they can alter the shield frequencies and end the
transport suddenly, with rather messy results.

....

"How do replicators work?"

Replicators are based on transporter technology. A sample object
is first "scanned" into the memory of a computer. Because even a
simple object takes up an enormous amount of memory, the object
is only resolved at a molecular level, not a quantum level.
Further, the data must be compressed using a lossy algorithm,
meaning that small, undetectable approximations are made to the
data. This gives the computer a pattern to create a duplicate of
the original. (TNG TM)

Starships have a small supply of bulk material that is constantly
recycled into needed materials and items. When a request is made
at a replicator terminal, the waveguide conduit system on the
ship relays a small amount of bulk material to the replicator,
which uses it to create the materials called for in the pattern.
The object is then beamed in at the terminal.

....

"Can replicators transmute elements?"

Yes... sort of. There have been occasions on the show where some
required element cannot be replicated. The Tech Manual talks
about "quantum transformational manipulation", so they can do
some quantum twiddling to get new elements. However, it also says
that the energy costs are high for all forms of replication, and
that food, since it's usually just different arrangements of the
same basic things (water, proteins, lipids), is more practical to
replicate from bulk matter than to store.

....

"What about gold-pressed latinum?"

See above about energy costs and certain elements. It may be that
24th century technology can't transmute, say, elements above 140,
and that latinum (in gold-pressed form) is a stable metal
somewhere up there. Or, alternatively, it could take *exactly*
the same amount of energy to replicate as it takes to mine/
manufacture , making it a good standard for monetary
transactions.

....

"What happens to the glasses when they're done with them?"

The empty glasses, plates, etc, are put back in the replicator
terminal (TNG "Timescape"), and returned as raw materials to the
bulk matter store. It would make sense if they were only
disassembled on the molecular level, as the energy needed to
reform new glasses would be much lower than if they were broken
down to the atomic level.

....

"Why don't they use replicators to do instant ship repair?"

For minor repair, it might be feasable, but we rarely see any
sort of repairs actually being done.  When Geordi says "30
minutes at least, Captain", they might be replicating various
components and using a transporter-effected swapout. Recall,
however, that the transporters and replicators use a lot of
power. The replicators go offline in Alert situations, for
example. It would be foolish to rely on such a system to repair
the ship in emergencies, but it is doubtless used at other time.

For large scale repair, I think the TNG Tech Manual says it best:
"... if you *could* make a starship at the touch of a button, you
wouldn't *need* to..."

....

"Can you make two Datas with the transporter?"

No. It is not possible (with 24th century technology, at least)
to replicate something at the quantum level. First, the amount of
information needed to define a living, thinking being at that
level of detail is incredibly large, far surpassing the computer
capacity of any 24th century database. (TNG TM)

Secondly, there is no way to scan at quantum resolution without
destroying the subject. The transporter ACB need not know the
precise details of every particle being transported - where they
are and what they are doing is enough. Further, attempting to
retrieve such information from the ACB would destroy it.

To duplicate a living being, a hypothetical effect, which I call
an Annular Confinement Beam-Splitter, would be needed.  As the
ACB was passed through it, along with a supply of raw phased
matter, it would duplicate the ACB's contents in the raw stream.

....

"Hey! What about "The Enemy Within" and "Second Chances" ?"

For better or worse, no such device has been intentionally
created by 24th century science. However, in TOS "The Enemy
Within", Kirk's duplication may have been caused by some
accidental effect which caused an ACBS to form in the normal
transporter mechanism, with disasterous results.

In TNG "Second Chances", the mechanism by which Riker is
duplicated is explained in detail. During transport through
severe atmospheric interference, the transporter chief locked
onto Riker's signal with a second ACB. When it turned out not to
be needed, the second signal was abandoned. The atmospheric
interference caused the second ACB to be reflected back to the
planet, and somehow the matter stream was duplicated, using
phased matter from the atmospheric interference effect to
provide the duplicate mass.

....

"Could surgery be performed with a transporter?"

It all depends on the surgery. For example - could I suspend you
in transport, reform the pattern so that your arm is no longer
broken, your skin is no longer cut, etc? Yes. But in sickbay they
already have machines which do it near-instantly, and don't take
the massive resources of the transporter.

For such things as removing a tumor, you must consider what
replaces the object being transported away. In all likelyhood, a
vacuum. Having a small vacuum appear inside you body is probably
more deadly than the tumor was in the first place.

It has been suggested that you could synchronize two ACBs and
beam in a saline solution in place of the tumor you are
transporting out, but again, why bother? There are already
medical devices which probably use micro-transporter technology
to effect the surgery.

....

"What about the time when... ?"

Star Trek has "broken" the rules of transporters a number of
times.  There are very few glaring examples of misuse of the
transporter as a plot device to save the day, but the worst
include:

TNG "Rascals" - Picard, Keiko, Guinan and Ro are turned into
children in a freak transporter accident, and later restored. I
won't even try.  First off, the biology used in this episode is
pure BS.  Secondly, if a quick fix like this can alter the aging
process, then by doing it intentionally, no-one will ever grow
old and die again. Amusing episode, but it gets a thumbs down in
the Treknology category.

TNG "Unnatural Selection" - The transporter magically rejuvinates
Pulaski. While the mechanism by which her cure works is
relatively sound, the fact that she recovers instantly is
anomalous. (See TNG "Man of the People" for a similar
insta-heal.) Better to just not ask.

TOS "Tomorrow Is Yesterday" - Somehow, the transporter is able to
erase the memories of people by transporting a newer version of
themselves over top of an older version.  Talk about saving the
day by transporter abuse!

TOS "The Enemy Within" - While I can buy the duplication effect,
and maybe even the two disperate personas of the two Kirks, I
think the recombination of the two was pushing the technology a
little bit.

....

"What about souls?"

Heh. Well, if you've already decided that Star Trek transporters
and souls don't get along, then accept that your position has
been made abundantly clear in the past, and don't bother to
followup.  Souls aren't precluded by transporters, they just
require that somehow, souls can (1) "tag along" with the physical
body through transport, (2) stay in stasis along with a body, and
(3) be duplicated. Since there isn't (and many maintain, there
can't be) any way of analyzing this hypothetical "soul", it makes
little sense to argue about what it can and cannot do.

....

"Can you transport while in Warp?"

Yes. According to the TM and "Best of Both Worlds II", if you're
in Warp you can transport as long as you are both at the same
Warp value. The TM says "integral warp value", but in BOBWII
they were chasing the Borg ship at, I believe, warp 9.6 or
something similar.

....

"What happened in "The Schizoid Man" ?"

The Enterprise dropped out of warp for a fraction of a second,
and engage the transport system. Troi reported feeling like she
was inside the wall for a moment. It appears that the matter
stream falls out of the ACB before transport is quite complete.
Definitely a nasty thing if things aren't perfect.

......................................................................

Contributors:
	John F. Meyer Jr.	<gtd322a@prism.gatech.edu>

......................................................................

----------------------------------------------------------------------
* My personal scale of "canon" for the purposes of *Treknology*:
	Canonical:	ST:TNG episodes
			ST:DS9 episodes
	Quasi-Canon:	ST:TNG Technical Manual
			ST Chronology: The History of the Future
			ST:TFS I-VI (+ any future films)
			ST:TOS episodes
	Semi-Canon:	ST:TNG Companion
			The Making of Star Trek
			Any *drawings* based on the episodes/
			films (eg, Starlog Tech Journal, 
			Mr. Scott's Guide, etc)
	Non-Canon:	Everything else, including:
				ST:TAS
				Books (incl. novelizations)
				Games (FASA, et. al.)
				Collectibles (toys, cards)
				Old Tech Manuals
				Rec.arts.startrek.tech posts
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments, questions, answers, mints, et. al. appreciated.

Joshua
--
|        "Has it been a bad year, or what?"    - Meriadoc Brandybuck,        |
|           upon returning to the Shire after the War of the Ring.           |
| jsbell@acs.ucalgary.ca  Academic Computing Services, University of Calgary |

