3.2 The Transporter - Once and For All

The Transporter — Once and for all

The Transporter is another one of Starfleet's remarkable devices that requires a little bit more explanation now that it can do more than was originally imagined twenty years ago. While transporter-derived technology can give us tasty foods, life-like scenery, musical instruments, and other bits of solid matter, it does have definite limitations. This article will attempt to clarify the operation of the Transporter in both beam-down and beam-up modes, and touch upon other uses of the device.

In brief, the Transporter is capable of beaming virtually anything — including human beings — from point to point with 100% fidelity. It is also capable of reproducing many objects such as foods, tools, and the like. The key limitation is that stored objects have only a limited “resolution” so that one CANNOT store and reproduce a living being.

The typical personnel or cargo Transporter consists of four major components: the Upper Pad, Lower Pad, Pattern Buffer, and Emitter Array.

The Upper and Lower Pads contain the equipment necessary to “read” an object's molecular and subatomic structure. These subsystems include molecular imaging scanners, ionizers, power feeds (primary and emergency), and phase transition coils.

The stream of molecules read by the pads is sent to the Pattern Buffer, a large cylindrical tank surrounded by superconducting electromagnetic coils. It is here that the object to be transported is stored momentarily before actual beaming away from the ship (or even within the ship). It is the Pattern Buffer and its associated subsystems that have been improved the most in the last half-century. While the actual molecules of an object are held in a spinning magnetic suspension (eight minutes tops before degradation), the construction sequence of the object can be read, recorded in computer memory (in some cases), and reproduced. There are limits to the complexity of the object, however, and this is where the potential “miracle” machine still eludes.

The Transporter cannot produce working duplicate copies of living tissue or organ systems.

The reason for this is that routine transport involves handling the incredibly vast amount of information required to “disassemble” and “reassemble” a human being or other life form. To transport something, the system must scan, process, and transmit this pattern information. This is analogous to a television, which serves as a conduit to process the vast amount of visual information in a normal television transmission.

Storing that information, however, is another matter. In our analogy, it would be like comparing a television (which is incapable of storing an image) to a videocassette recorder, which can store a relatively low-resolution recording of a television program. In order to store the patterns for a human being, one would have to record not only all the atomic and molecular configurations, but all the quantum and energy states of all the electron shells, and the Brownian motions of every sub-atomic particle of every atom. While we cannot store all of this incredibly complex information, we can use it as it is being handled in real-time.

This definitely precludes our use of the device to “bring back” a deceased crewmember, or even to clone a missing limb (other traditional cloning methods could be used). This is not to say that the Transporter cannot reproduce objects and organisms to be beamed; that is precisely what it does do, but the streams of ionized matter that come out will be the same as the stream that went in (when the device is working properly). One cannot, for example, put a wounded person in the Transporter and get back a healthy one, simply based on a person's original “pattern”. In transporter usage, the word “pattern” refers to the machine's internal molecular “instructions” for breakdown and reassembly. The amount of computer memory required to store an entire person is far beyond the reach of Federation science. As a person is beamed down, only a minute fragment of the instructions are being computed and used, then lost in each microsecond of the process. One amazing exception to this process was witnessed in the episode “Lonely Among Us”, in which a slightly altered Captain Picard returned through the Transporter; this can be assumed to have been a case of the Transporter being affected by the electromagnetic forces of the cloud-entity (ah ha!).

From the Pattern Buffer, the molecular stream and the coded instructions pass through a number of subsystems before reaching the emitter. These include the Subspace, Doppler, and Heisenberg Compensators. Each works to insure that the matter stream that is being transmitted or received is in the correct phase, frequency, and so on.

The actual point of departure from the ship is the emitter array on the hull of the ship. The Enterprise has a number of such emitters, each a gray and cream-colored antenna grid. The matter stream is processed through a device akin to a subspace radio and sent out. Each emitter takes care of targetting the correct reassembly spot, and also works in concert with the standard Starfleet communicator in locating crewmembers to beam up.

During beam-down, the emitter sends two discrete signals. The first is something like a carrier wave known as the ACB, or Annular Confinement Beam. The second is the actual matter stream. The ACB acts as a “tunnel” of energy, preventing the stream from breaking up as it travels down the center. In beam-down, both signals travel downward.

During beam-up, the emitter is configured a little differently. The ACB remains the same, but the matter stream must begin at the surface. In this case, the Transporter sends an “empty” signal to the ground, which intercepts the object to be beamed up, reverses direction, and “pulls” the object up with it. Back in the Transporter Room, the system disregards the empty signal until it senses the upcoming matter stream for reassembly.

Since all the outgoing and incoming signals travel in subspace, they are subject to all the familiar transmission and reception problems.

Improvements in computer memory storage and the reliability of pattern buffer devices have led to some changes in 24th Century life. Solid objects of low complexity can be reproduced, using raw materials to be reformed by the stored patterns. These techniques have worked best with stable, inanimate materials. As mentioned earlier, living tissues and organ systems are extremely complex and have proven difficult to copy. A discussion of the accidental experiment results may be obtained upon request. Plant biology can be copied with certain modifications; these minor changes are structural and undetectable to the eye, and can be used in places like the holodeck. A number of non-living tissues may also be copied, again with small molecular changes, and their nutritional value is unaltered (and in some cases improved.)