Comment on Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week agoMy headcanon is that they have feedstocks and are just teleporting atoms around and gluing them together, maybe adding and electron here and there. If anything it’s the most consistent use of their transporters.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 week ago
But we know that's not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn't be able to get "accidents" where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.
Also, that doesn't work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don't replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus... you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so... we're going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.
awesome_lowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Do we? Transporters are magic. They’ve never been logically consistent. Half the episodes either would have resolved in 5 minutes or never happened if they were.
Fully agreed. Just like transporters :P
MudMan@fedia.io 1 week ago
Oh, yeah, it's ALL handwavy bulls#!t. It's a 60s sci-fi TV show. A great one, but... you know.
I'll say that the transporters are some of the most consistent pieces of tech they came up with, though, at least as they get explored over time. They need a beam, they are disrupted by shields and interference, they turn people into a data buffer "pattern" that seems to follow the way data would behave, in that they can add and substract to it. You need to assume they don't use them as full-on cloning machines because of regulations, rather than tech limits, but it mostly makes sense.
Unfortunately the version that makes sense is the most disturbing interpretation, so they still need to handwave the crap out of it.