member of @staff, lapsed linguist and drummer, electronics hobbyist
zip's bf
no supervisor but ludd means the threads any good
wait, if you can stabilize someone who's decompensating by beaming them into a transporter pattern buffer and then deleting the transport, why does anyone ever die on a starfleet ship
can't they just have the computer monitor everyone's vital signs and do this automatically
this was a voyager plot point and iirc the reasoning was you had to encode them specially in a way that made them way worse at actually teleporting, and they took up way more space.
who knows if the writers of SNW remembered more than the putting them in it to save them, though.
I thought the TNG-ish canon was that transporters are fundamentally analog, and the signal degrades if it sits in the buffer for a few minutes. They do not have a technology that can reduce the position, velocity, spin, etc of every subatomic particle in your body into a manageable stream of bits.
you already know the answer is going to be some form of technobabble, right?
i assume there's some law against it bc of the possibility of duplicates, we've already seen what a hassle THEY can be
there's a voyager episode that's been stuck in my head for like 25 years where IIRC chakotay has to convince a guy to kill him with a phaser to get out of some goofy trap. He's like "if I'm immediately teleported to sickbay they can revive me, even if I've been braindead for up to three minutes"
child me just instantly going WAIT WHY HAS LITERALLY ANYONE EVER DIED FROM A PHASER THEN
That's definitely a like, consequence of the last run of shows being 20 years ago. From memory the enterprise in TNG can basically sustain one whole person in its memory banks (as a hologram or in the pattern buffer) and it overloads or drains too much power from the rest of the ship's systems. DS9 sustains 4 or 5 people from a pattern buffer by spreading them throughout the entire stations systems and it causes widespread damage. So in that technological era it seems like a RAM issue. @NireBryce below says it's possible on the Voyager? Which might be because of the specialist nature of that ship?
So I'm guessing SNW like, found that as a plot point without also like, going in depth in the way that was wrapped up in technological limitations of particular ships or stations?
It only puts them in stasis, essentially holding them at whatever state they were when they went in, so once they got out, they'd still die unless immediate medical care to preserve them is possible. But also as others have pointed out, at least in SNW, it's already been established last season that doing this long term wreaks hell on the systems, draining power and resources and can even still degrade is the systems fail.
This is mostly consistent with past episodes of other shows iirc. Scotty was in one for years but only because he was syphoning power from an entire Dyson sphere. Every other time it's done up, there's usually some technical reason why is not sustainable. Even in this latest instance, that did kinda prove to be the case.
heisenberg compensators wear out after a few minutes unless you perform special modifications
In addition to everyone's correct Technical Manual points here in the comments, I'll add that if you've ever played New Super Mario Bros Wii, you know that at some point you come across a stage where the three other players bubble up and you have to complete it while trying not to burst them out of stasis. What happens when the Enterprise gets down to just an Ensign in the transporter room and everyone else in the pattern buffer, watching those transporter worms swim around for all eternity?
A lot of very good points in the replies but also: the sheer frequency of transporter failures and accidents should dissuade people, presumably if they did do this most people would just die from getting accidentally buffer overflowed into the holodeck with the safety off instead of whatever was going to kill them
Same reason they accidentally made Moriarty real on the holodeck and it changed nothing about society or technology: It worked for the story that one time, shrug w/e next episode!
Oh, like when [spoiler] died in 2se8 I immediately said to my husband, "Whatever, that's survivable, especially for a [spoiler] if they stick 'em in the transporter" and YET.
Except I think the killer was Having a Bad Day and definitely not going to help with that, nor the witness, so....
we figured it was also an ethics thing? like. M'8enga does it 8ecause he's more ok8y with the ethics of it, 8ut it's generally frowned upon? — June
There's some definite inconsistency, but we've seen a couple long running pattern buffers used this way before. Happened to Scotty, which allowed him to eventually be beamed into TNG. Patterns have also been stuck, relatively stably, in subspace for long periods of time as early as the transporter has existed (see Quinn Erickson). But maintaining a pattern is usually at least partially an active process and definitely degrades the longer it is held most of the time. By DS9 they can theoretically store a pattern in memory, but it took the entire computer core of the station and the active holosuites to do it. It's not better than immediately beaming someone to sickbay though where possible.
As for knife wounds, I think knives are just more dangerous in the Trek universe :P. Klingons, canonically FULL of redundant organs due to genetic engineering IN A CULTURE FULL OF KNIFE FIGHTS are still ALWAYS dying instantly to knife wounds.
I am a big New Star Trek defender generally but they sure have developed an affinity for this trick and every time they use it I can't help but feel like it takes a bit away from Scotty in that TNG episode where they find him saved in the buffer on his crashed ship and it's framed as this ingenious trick he pulled which was nonetheless pretty risky as evidenced by the fact that the other guy with him had irrecoverable pattern loss. Granted that's on a much longer time scale and without somebody to monitor the buffer but still...
