VOY 3x26: Scorpion Part 1
Is there some kind of Starfleet form I can sign to opt out of transporter hacks you "just came up with"?
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I’m always a bit disappointed with how safe and PG Star Trek is. Because transporters would be an awesome way to put some gruesome body horror into the series.
It really is the scariest thing by far on any ship. The ‘science’ behind transporters basically makes it a murder machine if it works correctly. I want to see what horrors beyond imagination can occur when that thing messes up or is deliberately sabotaged.
In the first film, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," a horrific transporter accident occurs in the first act. It's kind of a plot point as the Chief Science Officer (a Vulcan we only briefly meet at Starfleet HQ) is killed along with another poor soul, necessitating Mr. Spock's return to his seat. It's fairly graphic, you hear screaming and see deformed humanoid shapes in the transporter "light show" on the ship's platforms... the transporter technician says "oh no, they're forming" shortly before what's left of them is beamed back down to San Francisco. Starfleet ground control then confirms to Kirk and Co that "what made it back didn't live long."
Later (like only three or four scenes later), we are told that Dr McCoy doesn't want to use the transporter to board the ship -likely because of the obvious inherent danger of the device- but is ordered to beam aboard by Kirk. His worry is then played for laughs... as if not an hour ago two people got melted and died. It's a bizarre shift in tone, only made weirder by the framing of Bones as an old Luddite for being scared to use it.
And Bones had no problem using it in TOS, so it didn't even make much sense.
The danger of the transporter is not really talked about in TOS, outside of accidentally sending folks to the Mirror universe. Wait, I'm just realizing... so, on top of possibly causing untimely (not instant enough for my liking) death and nonconsensual cloning, any old transporter can also accidentally create a portal to fully up-and-running interplanetary fascism. It's just a dangerous technology all the way down.
ENT did a little bit of body horror with the transporters since they were still new in-universe. One of the away team was beamed up during a storm, and some branches and leaves blew into the beam and became integrated into him when he rematerialized. He got better.
I'm hazy on the specifics, but in DS9, someone sabotaged the transporter and the contact they were supposed to meet burned alive during rematerialization. That was pretty gory for Trek.
Galaxy Quest went all the way and turned the pig-monster inside out lol ... and then it exploded.
Same thing happened to Jeff Goldblum but he got weirder
I don't get the reference, but I want to. What movie was that?
The Fly?
Yes.
Geordie: Reg, transporting really is the safest way to travel.
Reg: Didn't one of them turn you into a ghost last week?
Well, it creates a copy of you in another place and renders the real you apart atom by atom. That's pretty metal IMO.
You say that, but the warp core is also pretty nasty stuff. Not only is it full of flesh melting radiation and coolant, but a slight knock will cause it to explode, at least on any ship built in the 24th century.
At least you can not use a transporter. You kind of scuffed if you're on a warp core powered ship and it suddenly goes up in smoke.
Well sure, the warp core is inherently dangerous. But they seem to have a good grasp on the radiation aspect as well as general safety. It’s also a fairly acceptable trade off to sail among the stars at faster than light speed.
But the transporter? I consider it an inherently evil and untrustworthy device. It basically kills the user, sends an energy beam and reassembles an entity at the other end that thinks it’s the person who just stepped on the pad.
We know this is how it works, because we’ve seen incidents that clearly show us. In TOS ‘The Enemy Within’, Kirk is split into two people. And similarly, in TNG’s ‘Second Chances’, the transporter again splits Riker into two people.
Logically, if the transporter sent and reassembles the actual matter, clearly it wouldn’t be able to make perfect copies. You’d end up with two half scale copies at best. So, the matter used to reassemble is not the same matter that was disassembled. Therefore, the transporter inherently murders anyone who uses it.
So nooooo thank you, I’m taking the shuttle.
At least with Riker, we also know that it is a combination of the transport operator splitting Riker across two transport streams instead of the usual one, and a bunch of unique circumstances surrounding an ion storm. It's only been done twice, from people doing the exact same procedure in exacting circumstances.
We also know that the transporter isn't a simple clone and kill device, otherwise, their replicators would just utilise the same functionality, and we know that they lack the fine detailed resolution to recreate living matter, or computer chips with it, the result having telltale problems indicative of replication.
Scotty and Voyager would not need to rig up some hyper-complex loop procedure to keep people inside of the transporter otherwise. They could just keep the clone pattern, and put it into normal persistent storage. DS9 shows that that is possible to do that, albeit for a small handful of people per Cardassian space station. The transport accident in TMP would never need to happen, because they could just abort the transport procedure and recreate the clone from the sending transporter.
We also know that the transporter has some error correction capabilities. Scotty seemed reasonably convinced that it might have been possible to recall Lt. Franklin. Geordi disagreed, but more due to the level of pattern degradation, rather than a damaged pattern at all. Though fabricating half a person is almost definitely pushing the limits of those capabilities, it's not impossible. Those imperfections and errors are implied to be what caused Transporter Psychosis in the early days. There do also seem to be variations in the copies that come out the other end. Both parts of Kirk came out different, as did both copies of Boimler. Riker may have been the same, but we don't know enough to say for sure.
Untrue, for the most part. We're explicitly told that the matter stream is what gets transported, with the constituent matter being converted to energy, moved across, and converted back. Barclay is held at that junction where his matter starts converting to energy, and there's a real concern that it wouldn't be possible to hold him in that state for long.
He then doubles his mass by grabbing onto another person, which oughtn't be possible if the transporter was cloning people, since the other transporter would not have received the pattern to reintegrate with. It'd just squish everything into a double-mass Barclay.
No thanks