this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
527 points (98.9% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
6054 readers
778 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Transporters ar le weird. The way Dr. M'Benga keeps people in the transport buffer until there is a cure for their disease (Rukiya) or until medical facilities are no longer overrun (Battle of J'Gal) is presented as a hack. How is it not standard procedure?
Also he has to materialize them from time to time because their pattern degrades. So is it not a digital image of sorts? How can it degrade?
What would happen to the people if the buffer were to lose power or malfunction in any way? Even a small risk of anything adverse plus the degradation while being stored would make this not acceptable from medical viewpoint.
but really though, they have time stopper technology for people with incurable diseases. that's absolutely something that people would take a risk on in the face of certain death. put up a few redundant fusion reactors and battery backups and people would take up the offer.
I have to wonder why the pattern must be lost in the process of materialization. I'm not saying they should keep them forever, but if they can just not delete the patterns when sending people on a dangerous away mission, they'd leave open the option of restoring them to a back up state if they get killed (or worse).
Of course, while that would raise a lot of questions to be explored in a single episode, it would lower stakes and fundamentally changes the stories they can tell, so I'm not surprised they writers don't do it.
The pattern is clearly meant to be more than just data too, because they have used previous transporter logs when they need a healthy snapshot to compare to a crewmate who is ill. It seems to be some kind of superstitious energy reserve that is that person, and no you can't just siphon some juice out of the reactor and use previous scan data for reasons that are generally presented as technical ones, but could really only logically be ethical ones.
I can imagine the Klingons having a kind of special forces unit where they do copies like this and if the copy makes it back, the two versions fight to the death to see who the "real" one is.
No DNA fixes either, I guess to not break the universe, but still wtf.
There are loads of examples where they edit the image before rematerializing. Like removing an illness or fixing age or splitting Tuvix.
I'd imagine the eugenics wars have something to do with why they don't except in extenuating circumstances.
Kinda implies it's an analogue process. More like an AM radio than a digital image.
I'd guess that's not exactly in the manual. And given the inherent danger and any legality issues, that's something people don't often share if they figure out how to do it.