transporters?

[mojo]

if this has been covered, my apologies. i did a rather lazy search and didn't find it. i'm sure someone's asked before but..
the other day i was flipping through the channels and i saw the tng ep where there were 2 rykers. i understand that this was b/c there was some problem and clearly not something they would normally do. but if the star wars managed to capture a ship with functional equipment, and figured out how to use it, could they spit out a whole bunch of, say, luke skywalker clones? given that they didn't run out of whatever energy and matter requirements needed, could they build an army of luke skywalkers in fairly short order?
also, i recall an ep of some st show (i haven't seen this in a LONG TIME) where i believe worf broke his back, or something, and they used the transporter to beam his consciousness into a body with an unbroken back? i could be remembering this wrong, clearly. but if they could do that, could they use the transporter to change other things, like increase muscle mass, or even increase midichlorian count?
sorry again if this is all really old news.

[mojo]

i love how i didn't bother to even type 'the star wars guys', which would have been pitiful enough, but somehow managed to sink even lower. what if the star wars got a star trek ship? oh no! the star wars!

[Cocytus]

The first episode is TNG S6 "Second Chances." The E-D discovers a duplicate Riker on Nervala Four. The second Riker was produced by the transporter operator adding a second annular confinement beam when he was trying to beam Riker off the planet 8 years prior. Given that Starfleet is capable of energy-matter conversion, this produced two complete Rikers. The same duplicate Riker shows up in DS9 S3 "Defiant."

The second episode is TNG S5 "Ethics," where Worf has his spine replaced by the experimental and controversial genitronic replicator, courtesy of Dr. Toby Russell who cares more about advancing her work than the safety of her patients. Worf comes back to life thanks to the redundant systems Klingons evolved.

As for your question, the original accident which produced two Rikers occurred under unusual circumstances. Here's the full dialogue:

GEORDI
(to Riker)
... apparently there was a massive
energy surge in the distortion
field around the planet just at
the moment you tried to beam out.
The Transporter Chief tried to
compensate by initiating a second
containment beam.

DATA
An interesting approach. He must
have been planning to reintegrate
the two patterns in the transport
buffer.

GEORDI
Turns out he didn't have to.
Commander Riker's pattern
maintained its integrity with just
the one containment beam -- he
made it back to the ship just
fine.

BEVERLY
What happened to the second beam?

GEORDI
The Transporter Chief shut it
down, but somehow... it was
reflected back to the surface.

PICARD
And another Wil Riker materialized
there.

RIKER
How could the second pattern have
maintained its integrity?

GEORDI
The containment beam must have had
the exact same phase differential
as the distortion field.

Me, I don't think the Star Wars Guys could go around copying powerful Jedi even if they figured out the workings of the transporter.

[mojo]

it's bothersome in more ways than one. for instance, (and i know this isn't canon) the tech manual gives some gobbledeegook stuff about transporters somehow transferring a person's consciousness to the new body when you transport, obviously they were trying to get around the idea that when you make a perfect copy of someone, the old version simply dies. a perfect replica is created, but the old one is destroyed. i have no problem with the idea that somehow a person's mind can be placed in the new body, because, you know, the other option is HORRIFIC, but how can there be two rikers if there's only one soul?

[mojo]

also, i should have taken more time to phrase my question. given that pretty much every member of this board knows more about trek than i do, what i want to know is COULD this be done? could the transporter be used to do this, as you understand it to work?

[Cocytus]

You know, now that I've thought about this more, this could actually work. The E-D intentionally used the transporter to restore Dr. Pulaski to her original age after she contracted the rapid-aging disease of the Darwin Research Station in TNG S2 "Unnatural Selection" by recreating her entire genome with a hair.

The whole problem in "Second Chances" was that the transporter operator on the Potemkin 8 years prior had intended to shut the second beam down, but it was "somehow" reflected to the surface, and made it through the distortion field intact. That right there is an amazing stroke of luck, given that, had the wave of the beam been interfered with or phase-shifted, as Geordi seems to hint at, no second Riker would have materialized. If the Star Wars Guys were trying this without having to deal with some pesky distortion field, they might actually have an easier time of it, provided they could learn the transporter itself. Star Wars is very technologically stagnant. I mean hell, hyperdrives and lightsabers have been pretty much the same for 20,000 years if you go by the EU? Wrapping their heads around the technology might be the biggest problem.

[mojo]

i could have sworn i read that there's a huge buffer the transporter uses which has a record of all the people that have gone through. it would take a massive amount of effort to find the source, though. it might be in the tech manual itself, but i don't think so right off. if that's the case, and every time you go through the buffer updates it's information on you, then why does anyone ever die? and i'm not even going to go into the old 'why does anyone allow themselves to get old' argument.
just like data could instantaneously solve at least 75% of the trouble the enterprise gets into, the transporters could seemingly solve all health problems with the crew. and even if the star wars folks couldn't figure it out, if there was a war between sw and st, why wouldn't the st folk spit out an army of datas and beam them aboard opposing ships? with the speed and strength he shows in some eps, throwing 10 of them at a jedi would surely win that matchup pretty quickly.

[General Donner]

it's bothersome in more ways than one. for instance, (and i know this isn't canon) the tech manual gives some gobbledeegook stuff about transporters somehow transferring a person's consciousness to the new body when you transport, obviously they were trying to get around the idea that when you make a perfect copy of someone, the old version simply dies. a perfect replica is created, but the old one is destroyed. i have no problem with the idea that somehow a person's mind can be placed in the new body, because, you know, the other option is HORRIFIC, but how can there be two rikers if there's only one soul?

I seem to recall a TOS episode where Kirk's personality was split in a transporter screwup. A quick check has that as "The Enemy Within" (TOS S1, E5). The mishap produced two Kirks, one good and weak and one strong but evil. One got his soul and the other his animal nature, or something.

[mojo]

uh, are we talking about the same riker? what 'animal nature' would the second riker have? this is a dude who couldn't bring himself to take a chance on asking troi out on a date for ages when he knew FOR A FACT that she was telempathic(?) and knew he was in love with her or whatever, and clearly was ok with the idea.
also, animal nature? i thought this was star trek, where we at least pretend things should be possible in real life. i would literally rather believe that picard was killed thousands of times over the course of his career and replaced by a duplicate copy than believe that someone can be chopped into two bits consisting of 'regular human guy' and 'animal nature'.
ugh.

[mojo]

UGH!

[Cocytus]

The General was speaking of Kirk, not Riker. It was a TOS episode.

i could have sworn i read that there's a huge buffer the transporter uses which has a record of all the people that have gone through. it would take a massive amount of effort to find the source, though. it might be in the tech manual itself, but i don't think so right off. if that's the case, and every time you go through the buffer updates it's information on you, then why does anyone ever die? and i'm not even going to go into the old 'why does anyone allow themselves to get old' argument.
just like data could instantaneously solve at least 75% of the trouble the enterprise gets into, the transporters could seemingly solve all health problems with the crew. and even if the star wars folks couldn't figure it out, if there was a war between sw and st, why wouldn't the st folk spit out an army of datas and beam them aboard opposing ships? with the speed and strength he shows in some eps, throwing 10 of them at a jedi would surely win that matchup pretty quickly.

Another age defying use of the transporter occurs in TNG S6 "Relics," where the crew find Scotty in the Jenolan's transporter buffer. He had rigged it to keep his pattern intact for 75 years, in essence placing himself in suspended animation.

Anyway, as to why the Federation doesn't use the transporter to mass-produce Datas, remember they fought a court case over Data's rights in "Measure of a Man" (S2). They were against even trying to learn how to duplicate him traditionally, so it stand to reason they wouldn't want to do it with the transporter either. It's an ethical question more than a technological one. They don't build superweapons either, even though they're more than capable.

The problem of ethics is also probably why they don't use the transporter for immortality either. They seem to have a doctrine of respect for the course of life, even when it includes letting planetary populations perish in TNG S7 "Homeward." Only if directly asked will they intervene in such a situation.

As for health issues, that one is troubling to me as well. We hear about things like biosynthetic limbs in DS9, when really I see no reason why the couldn't use the transporter to materialize a new limb. Man with two legs beams down on away mission, man loses leg, man is beamed back to ship. Last pattern is used as template to materialize new leg. Makes sense to me, especially since, as per a statement by Bashir in DS9, they haven't worked out how to grow new organs using stem cells.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Transporters?







One will do.

[Kor_Dahar_Master]

In TNG: "Rascals" Captain Picard, Ensign Ro, Guinan, and Keiko O'Brien are turned into children by a transporter accident and later turned back into adults and in all incarnations they retain their personalities and memories.

[mojo]

while in an ordinary situation the ethics of the situation with mass-producing datas would be an issue, if they were losing a war i think they might change their minds, especially since i can't imagine data having a problem with the idea in that situation.
and the health thing, i mean, there's even precedent for it. meh.

[Mike DiCenso]

The issue of what Trek transporters do has been heavily hashed out in the "Do Transporters Kill?" thread from last year. I recommend that you read through it as it answers quite a few questions and raises others. In particular, look at the way transporters are seen to work in TNG's "Realm of Fear", where transport is more like travelling through a subspace tunnel in a phased state than being broken apart into energy, and then reassembled as a clone.
-Mike