Transporter (Star Trek) Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
]]In the Star Trek fictional universe, transporters are a form of teleportation. The devices disassemble a person or object into their component molecules, then "beam" them to the target, where they are reassembled. The target can either be another transporter or another specified site.
Transporters were devised by the creators of Star Trek to avoid having to build expensive shuttle sets and to film model shots. They were first seen in the pilot episode "The Cage". They are one of the most abused and magical technologies of Star Trek — several episodes have had plots based upon transporter malfunctions, and in some they have acted as a deus ex machina to solve the problem-of-the-week.
Limitations include range up to 30,000 kilometers (although subspace transporters have been introduced without this problem) and the inability to transport through deflector shields (unless it is needed for the plot, in which case a method of "penetrating" the shields is discovered). We sometimes see transporters allowing people to move during the transport (indeed, this is the plot of "Realm of Fear"), but other times they seem to freeze people. In "Bloodlines", it appears a transporter altered a person's position in transit to stop them from falling over. Many references have been made to a biofilter, a device which removes infectious agents from a person.
The transporters supposedly transport objects exactly, down to the quantum level, which should conflict with the uncertainty principle. In an attempt to rectify this paradox, the concept of a "Heisenberg compensator" was introduced. When asked how it worked, the show's technical adviser, Michael Okuda, said "Very well, thank you.".
The latest "Mark" for transporters, as revealed in , is the "Mark VII", which is capable of handling unstable biomatter.
Notable transporter malfunctions/abuses include
- "The Enemy Within": A transporter makes two nearly identical copies of Captain Kirk after he beams up, one good, one bad.
- "Mirror, Mirror": A transporter swaps a returning landing party with their counterparts from a parallel universe.
- : Someone is killed in a transporter-to-transporter transport.
- "Unnatural Selection": A disease affecting Pulaski is cured, and the damage it done removed, by transporter.
- "Relics": Scotty managed to keep himself in the buffer of a transporter, unaging, for seventy years.
- "Rascals": Interference from a spatial anomaly causes four characters, Picard, Guinan, Ro Laren, and Keiko O'Brien, to regress into children when they beam from a shuttlecraft.
- "Second Chances": Commander Riker was once "cloned" by a transporter when beaming through a distortion field. The duplicate took on Commander Riker's middle name (becoming Thomas Riker), and appeared again in later episodes.
- "Deadlock": A baby is delivered by transporter.
- "Tuvix": A transporter accident melds Tuvok and Neelix into one being.
- "Drone": A highly selective transporter accident caused a super-borg drone to be created.
- "Scorpion, Part 1": After a conventional signal lock fails during an emergency beam-out, engineer B'Elanna Torres successfully transports an away team back to the ship by locking onto their bones. This became known as a skeletal lock.
Despite these episodes, transporters are generally considered safe, and the transporterphobia of characters like Dr. Leonard McCoy, Lt. Reginald Barclay, and Dr. Katherine Pulaski not understood. Presumably shuttle crashes occur more often than transporter accidents, but are just less interesting in plot terms. A transporter accident is caused when a person using a transporter is somehow not reassembled correctly. This can be caused by human error, but safeguards in the system make this very unlikely. Computer malfunctions are also highly unlikely in the more advanced systems, and are only caused by extremely unusual conditions.
On , the crew mainly use the shuttles; the transporter is used very rarely, as it is new and not quite trusted.
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2 Other transporters 3 See also 4 External links |
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Other transporters
The idea of matter teleportation is not unique to Star Trek. Around the same time as the original series was airing in the United States, the British series Doctor Who introduced the very similar "Transmat" which worked essentially the same as a transporter. (One of the first uses of Transmat technology is in the story "The Moonbase" in which Transmats are used to teleport people from the earth to the moon.)See also
External links