This is topic Geordi Made a Funny! in forum Starships & Technology at Flare Sci-Fi Forums.


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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
I just turned on the rerun of "Realm of Fear," another one where the writers trot out Reg Barclay to torment. Just a little while after I turned it on, Geordi asked (to Barclay),

"How many transporter accidents have there been in the last 10 years? Two? Three?

Just out of curiosity, I started looking through the TNG episode list for some answers to that question. The show didn't have a single transporter accident in the five seasons before the episode. But just in that season (the sixth), they had THREE! Aside from "Realm of Fear" itself, there was also "Rascals" and "Second Chances" (yeah, it was 8 years before, but that counts since it's "the last 10 years" ). Then after that, there was DS9's "Past Tense," "Our Man Bashir," not to mention VGR's unmentionable, like "Tuvix" and the somewhat-better "Drone"...

Considering that Starfleet would almost certainly be getting higher-quality equipment than civilian organizations, it really makes me wonder whether Geordi was just talking out of his ass at that moment to reassure Barclay. And these were only in four Starfleet posts out of HOW many? What're the odds?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
I thought you meant Geordi's "Did their rubberband break?" line from Samaritan Snare.
Every now and then he could be a smartass.

[ September 11, 2003, 07:18 PM: Message edited by: Jason Abbadon ]
 

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Posted by The359 (Member # 37) on :
 
Maybe he meant Transporter accidents that resulted in death.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Not just horrible mutilation.
 

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
 
Is that what happened to Joan Rivers?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Rivers was the unfortunate victim of a dehydrating machine set on overload and is now a living beef jerky.

...or her daughter is immortal and it's some kind of Dorian Gray thing.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
I'd question whether all those would count as "Transporter Accidents", at least if you mean "the transporter malfunctioning and causing death/mutilation/oldness".

"Our Man Bashir" involved a transport off of an exploding ship. I highly doubt that the transporters were designed with that in mind. The fact that the crew were saved at all is a testement to how good the transporters actually were.

"Second Chances" wasn't really an accident, as far as I can see. Sure, we had another Riker created, but there were no side effects for either of them.

And "Past Tense" involved some kind of crazy one in a billion tranport through a quantumn singularity, or something mad like that, didn't it?

For the civilian transporters, how many times do you think they transport through crazy spatial distortions or exploding runabouts or evil monkeys?
 

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Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
 
If those don't count then neither does Tuvix... it wasn't the transporters fault it was the plant's.

I'd say the same for Drone, but I don't remember exactly how Seven's nanoprobes got into the doctor's emitter.

PS: Why didn't the doctor's program get assimilated and we see a holographic borg?
 

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Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :
 
Well, I'd count any accident or weird phenomenon that involves a transporter as a transporter accident. Maybe even even malfunctions that would not be worth mentioning in an episode, for instance, if one transporter fails and another one takes over the beaming procedure.
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
But the transporters surely can't have been designed to beam people off of a ship that explodes suddenly? It should be taken as credit that it still saved them.

Also, doesn't present day equipment often have lots of built in back-ups and redundencies to cover failure? When an internet...thingie...goes down and another...thingie...takes over, do we say that the internet has malfunctioned?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Yeah, LOTS of modern backups.
Recall that small blackout from a few weeks back?

It's amazing that they can remove excess energy from a explosion or even the phaser energy from a discharging weapon in transit.
By the same token, a ship should be able to beam knockout gas onto a enemy's bridge.
Or just beam over a lethal dose of radiation.
Or (for hat phychological torture-effect) beam a few hundred gallons of blood into their turbolifts and monitor their comm trafic for the screams.....
 

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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
Bernd: I would agree with your assertion in principle; however, in practice, we generally see Our Heroes travelling all over the place and visiting all sorts of unusual locales, many of which have "unusual" conditions that interfere with the transporter in some way or another.

For instance -- take TNG's "The Next Phase." That's definitely an accident, but one that could hardly have been foreseen, considering the practically nonexistent experience the Federation (and Starfleet) have with operating -- much less malfunctioning -- cloaking devices.

Of course, considering the somewhat magical capabilities of the transporter already mentioned, like filtering out or "deactivating" a phaser in the process of firing, it seems strange that they can't handle other sorts of energy spikes that occur. (Well... in "The Next Phase" they again just weren't aware of the problem until it was way too late, and so can't really compensate for it.)

An interesting question might be... just how much can a transporter beam be protected? They've got the biofilter, which can definitely scan for and remove known bioagents. Is there some sort of LCARS equivalent of ScanDisk for the transporter buffer? 8)

Something like that would probably require obscene amounts of processing power in order to perform the operation in a timely manner. Also, considering the relatively frequent mention of degrading transporter signals, it seems likely that transporters don't self-check the actual information in the buffer, but rather just pass it on to be rematerialized.

...Which just might explain the frequency of transporter accidents in the first place.
 

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Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
 
Uh... deactivating the phaser doesn't mean you take the energy away that is being discharged. If you remove the crystal within the phaser then the energy isn't discharged as a phaser blast... in fact it probably wouldn't even be released from the battery because a part is missing--- a type of power on self test on triggering that makes sure it won't blow up.

In short it's like transporting someone with a gun, then forgetting to materialize the bullets when they appear on the pad. It's simple.

I really don't think that "energy" is the component that is being removed... I think it is the device that focuses that energy that is removed.

At the same time... beaming stuff over to another ship is hard when they have shields
 

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Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
 
Except in Datalore Lore was beamed away while firing a phaser, and the little sparklies lit over the phaser beam itself.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Same with Data when he fired at Kevis Fajo (spelled wrong for certain!).
The phaser discharge set off a alarm and O'Brien removed the energy in transit.
 

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
 
Well, one of the theories about why phaser beams are slower than light and why we can see them is that there's some sort of matter in the beam. That could also account for the transporter effect.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Possibly a phaser sunders the air molecules along the path of the beam and that's why it's visible and slower than light.
The atoms of oxygen breaking down along the beam's path is the energy discharged at the target.
This would explain why there's heat damage to a phaser blast.

Just a guess.
 

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Jason Abbadon:
Same with Data when he fired at Kevis Fajo (spelled wrong for certain!).
The phaser discharge set off a alarm and O'Brien removed the energy in transit.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Malnurtured Snay:
I always thought that when O'Brien beamed up Data, the firing pattern was interrupted (not that the energy beam itself was beamed up). If the weapon hadn't been disarmed in transit, it would have resumed firing when Data materialized.

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Is this not what I just said?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by PsyLiam:
That implies that O'Brien would be to hand while your weapon was in a state of discharge.

Still, it takes all sorts, eh?

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Well, somebody's gotta hold the camera.
 

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