The Untold Truth About Star Trek Transporters

Captain Kirk Beaming Down

According to Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), "transporting really is the safest way to travel" in the "Star Trek" universe. Having your atoms disassembled by a computer, beamed to another location, and then reassembled certainly does sound like an efficient (albeit terrifying) mode of transportation and practically everyone in the 24th century gets around with transporters.

La Forge even claims there have only been two or three transporter accidents in the past 10 years — but if that's true, then the 24th century must have a very different definition of the word "accidents." From age regression to accidental cloning, the U.S.S. Enterprise alone has had multiple bizarre transporter malfunctions in just its first seven years of service.

The problems get even weirder when you look at all the transporter accidents in the original " Star Trek ," " Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ," " Star Trek: Voyager ," and other "Trek" TV shows and movies. While some of these effects can actually be beneficial, you may want to read this article on the untold truths behind "Star Trek" transporters before calling out that old refrain: "Beam me up, Scotty." Because after your journey, there's a good chance you won't like how you get put back together.

Transporters Exist Because of Low FX Budgets

According to "The Making of Star Trek," franchise mastermind Gene Roddenberry originally wanted to shoot scenes of the Enterprise landing on alien planets, but this proved too expensive. Even building models of shuttlecrafts was too time consuming, and the crew needed an alternative when filming began.

To get around the problem, the special effects team created a teleportation effect for the crew to explain how they arrived on a planet's surface in the "Star Trek" pilot episode "The Cage." The transporter became very popular and influenced many episodes, causing all the later TV shows and movies to use it even as their FX budgets increased substantially. Thus, a special effect created for budgetary reasons ended up having a major real-world effect on pop culture.

Transporters Run on Glitter and Alka Seltzer

Ask a Trekkie how transporters work, and you might receive a technical explanation of the physics involved in disassembling and reassembling a person.

Well, guess what? In reality, transporters can run on anything from glitter to Alka Seltzer. According to " Inside Star Trek: The Real Story ," the special effects team created the first transporter effect by turning a slow-motion camera upside down, filming grains of aluminum powder dropping in front of a black background, and using the footage to create the "shimmer" effect between shots of the actors and the clean background. In later episodes, they created different transporter effects by filming  dissolving Alka Seltzer tablets and later glitter swizzled in a jar full of water.

More recent "Trek" movies and TV shows use computer effects. Today, practically  anyone can create their own Star Trek transporter effect with basic video editing software and some computer-generated effects. Even so, it's telling that one of the most iconic special effects in science fiction history was accomplished using materials anyone could buy at their local drug store.

People Suffer From Transporter Phobia

By the 24th century, millions of people travel by transporter every year. Even so, there are plenty of people who hate this mode of travel and do everything they can to avoid stepping onto a transporter pad.

In "The Next Generation" Season 6 episode "Realm of Fear,"  Lieutenant Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz) confesses he suffers from "transporter phobia" and suffers a panic attack when asked to beam down to a planet while plasma field disturbances adversely affect the transporter. As it turns out, his fears are justified, and he sees worm-like creatures in the transporter's matter stream that turn out to be human beings trapped in mid-transport.

People with transporter phobia may be ridiculed in the 24th century, but Barclay's actually in good company. Doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) famously hated transporters and insisted on using shuttlecrafts whenever possible. 

During the "Star Trek: Enterprise” television series, the original Enterprise crew also preferred using shuttles and only allowed themselves to be beamed up during emergencies. Considering all the horrible transporter malfunctions that would occur over the next two hundred years, this was very smart behavior.

Transporters May Technically Kill You Every Time You Beam Down

Transporter accidents have killed people in many gruesome ways. In " Star Trek: The Motion Picture ” (1979), memorably, some new officers experience a transporter malfunction and re-materialize as a semi-living mass of flesh that mercifully doesn't live for very long.

When you get down to it though, "Star Trek" transporters may very well murder every single person who uses one. According to multiple official explanations, including the one found in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual," transporters scan a person's body, convert said body into a matter stream, store those particles in a pattern buffer, send them to their destination via an energy beam, and then put those particles back together in the original configuration.

Many fans argue that this basically means a transporter kills you and only reassembles a copy of your body and mind. This idea is given credence by the fact that transporters don't have to use your original atoms to reassemble you, but can use any available atoms, leaving your original atoms floating somewhere in space.

This is similar to the " Ship of Theseus " thought experiment (famously  referenced in "Wandavision" ), which questions whether a person or object is still themselves once all the original components are replaced. The Star Trek graphic novel "Forgiveness" does claim that transporters manage to send your soul via the energy stream, which would indicate that transporters don't really kill you. That being said ... they kind of do.

Transporters Make Death Irrelevant

Transporters may or may not kill you, but having a computer advanced enough to scan and store a complete pattern of your body, mind, and memories actually makes death irrelevant. In the episode "Lonely Among Us" from Season 1 of "Next Generation," for instance,  Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) merges with an alien entity and beams off the ship, apparently destroying himself.

However, the Enterprise crew later realize that they can get Picard back by reversing the transport and reconstituting Picard as he was before the alien possessed him. This Picard is the same person in every respect, although he lacks the memories of when he and the alien entity were one, indicating he's an earlier version of Picard built from new atoms.

Oddly, this means a transporter can bring back anyone who dies from a mission just by saving their physical and mental patterns in the pattern buffer and reconstituting them after the original dies. The new version would lack the memories of that mission (including the memory of dying), but this would be a small price to pay for getting a chance to bring people back from the dead on demand. The only downside might be accidentally duplicating someone who isn't dead yet — which actually happened to one hapless crewman on "Next Generation."

Transporters Are Cloning Machines

Season 1 of the original "Star Trek" produced one of the show's weirder episodes with "The Enemy Within," where a transporter accident splits Captain Kirk (William Shatner) into a "good" but weak-willed Kirk and an  "evil" Kirk prone to overacting  (or at least, more overacting than Shatner normally did). As it turned out, both sides of Kirk needed to merge back together to form a whole personality, and Spock and Scotty were able to re-integrate them.

At least Kirk managed to pull himself together. A generation later, Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) wasn't so lucky when, on the "Next Generation" Season 6 episode "Second Chances," he learned he was unknowingly split into two exact duplicates thanks to a transporter accident while he was a lieutenant. While one Will Riker continued his career in Starfleet and rose to the rank of Commander, the other Riker (also Frakes) was marooned on an alien planet for eight years until the Enterprise rescued him.

From that point, things got even weirder. Lieutenant Riker decided to go by his middle name "Thomas" and start a new life. He joined a group of Maquis dissidents, then used his genetic pattern to pose as Will Riker and steal the U.S.S. Defiant in the "Deep Space Nine" Season 3 episode "Defiant." Later, he got caught and sentenced to life imprisonment in a Cardassian labor camp. Meanwhile, Commander William Riker continued to advance in his career and eventually became captain of the U.S.S. Titan. Wow, talk about an identity crisis.

Transporters Are Gene Splicers

David Cronenberg's classic 1986 remake of "The Fly"  showed how an early transporter (or "telepod") could accidentally splice someone's genetic code with an insect if it happened to be inside. By the 24th century, transporter gene splicing accidents have become somewhat prettier, but no less ethically disturbing.

In the "Voyager" Season 2 episode "Tuvix," Lieutenant Commander Tuvok (Tim Russ), Neelix (Ethan Phillips), and an alien plant get merged together in a transporter accident thanks to the plant's enzymes. The resulting hybrid being (played by actor Tom Wright) possessed their memories and called himself "Tuvix." Over time, Tuvix formed  relationships with the crew and came to see himself as a unique being (and looked at Tuvok and Neelix as his parents), resisting attempts to reverse the fusing process. However,  Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) forced him to go through the process anyway, effectively destroying him .

While the moral dilemma of forcing Tuvix to revert back to two beings made for some good drama, it almost seemed unnecessary. Since the transporters can effectively clone people, as they did with William Thomas Riker, why couldn't Voyager have simply made a copy of Tuvix and then separated one of them back into Tuvok and Neelix? Tuvix would have probably been more amenable to that idea.

Transporters Are A Fountain of Youth

Transporters might be able to reassemble you in exactly the same physical condition you were in at the moment of beam out ... but what if you don't want to be put back together as an out-of-shape middle-aged man or a dying woman?

No problem! As multiple "Star Trek” episodes have shown, the transporter can make you any age you want. In the "Next Generation” Season 6 episode "Rascals," a transporter accident removed key sequences in the crew's DNA, causing them to rematerialize as 12-year-olds, albeit with adult minds and memories. Doctor Crusher (Gates McFadden) later restored the missing sequences and returned the kids to adults, but she indicated that the regressed crewmembers could have simply grown up the normal way instead.

Okay, but say you don't want to restart your life as a preteen and go through puberty a second time? That still wouldn't be an issue. In the Season 2 episode "Unnatural Selection," Doctor Pulaski (Diana Muldaur) was stricken with a disease that accelerated her aging. To save her, the Enterprise used the transporter to re-code her DNA back to normal with a previous bio-pattern that put her back to her regular age.

Of course, since you could store bio-patterns of yourself every time you use the transporter, you could restore yourself to any age or physical condition — including how you looked during your twenties after spending months working out at the gym. Who needs a day spa when you've got a transporter?

Transporters Redefine How Childbirth Works

Starfleet doctors are some of the best medical professionals in the business. Not only can these specialists perform delicate surgery on multiple alien species, they're trained to use their advanced medical equipment to improvise in dangerous situations, leading to some ... well, innovative solutions.

In the "Deep Space Nine" Season 4 episode "Body Parts," Doctor Bashir (Alexander Siddig) was on a shuttle with Major Kira (Nana Visitor) and Chief O'Brien's pregnant wife Keiko (Rosalind Chao). When an accident endangered the lives of Keiko and her unborn son, Bashir decided to use the transporter to transfer the fetus into Kira's womb. Kira ended up carrying the infant to term, resulting in some weird moments for the O'Brien family.

This bizarre incident was motivated by  Nana Visitor's real-life pregnancy , which the writers decided to work into the show after Visitor feared her character might need to be written out. Oddly enough, while "Star Trek" science consultant André Bormanis didn't think such an operation would be scientifically possible, he later admitted that fifteen years after the episode aired,  the idea of a fetal transplant was being studied and could become a reality .

Transporters Can Turn You Into A Living Ghost

Why was Geordi La Forge so confident that transporters were safe? Probably because he suffered a transporter accident that should have killed him in the Season 5 "Next Generation" episode "The Next Phase," only to learn he wasn't really dead. The story had La Forge and Ensign Ro (Michelle Forbes) waking up on the Enterprise after a transporter malfunction, only to learn nobody could see or hear them and that they could walk through solid matter.

Ro believed the two of them died while being beamed up, but La Forge was skeptical, and learned a Romulan molecular phase inverter transformed them into "out of phase" versions of themselves. Luckily, he was able to get a message to Data, and the Enterprise reverted them to their solid states.

Ensign Boimler (Jack Quaid) suffered a more embarrassing version of this ghost-transformation in the Season 1 "Star Trek: Lower Decks" episode "Much Ado About Boimler." While helping an engineer test the transporter, Boimler was turned into a transparent, glowing version of himself that gave off a "transporter" sound. 

When his crew found him too distracting, they shipped him to "The Farm," a medical spa where all incurable "Star Trek" victims go. The Farm turned out to be a great place, but when Boimler reverted to normal, he was shipped back. Considering the Farm is basically a day spa with attractive nurses, maybe being a transporter accident victim wasn't such a bad thing after all.

Transporters Can Replace Cryogenic Freezing

There's been a lot of cinematic speculation about how cryogenics freeze a person into stasis, possibly allowing them to be revived years or even centuries later. In the movies, everyone from  Austin Powers to  Captain America to  Doctor Evil have attempted it, with varying success.

Well, guess what? In the "Trek” universe, you don't have to bother with messy cold storage. Just store your pattern in the transporter buffer of your ship and wait for someone to re-materialize you. 

That's what Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) did for himself and his crewmate when their ship crashed on a Dyson sphere in the "Next Generation” Season 6 episode "Relics." While his friend's pattern degraded too much for him to be revived (guess Scotty wasn't that much of a miracle worker), Scotty was taken out of storage 75 years later by the crew of the Enterprise-D.

Oddly enough, in the rebooted Kelvin timeline, an alternate Scotty lost Admiral Archer's beagle Porthos in a transwarp beaming experiment. However, in the IDW comic book "Star Trek" #12, Scotty brought Porthos back, showing that animals can also be kept in stasis for extended periods of time. Undoubtedly, this technology will someday revolutionize how our kennels operate.

Transporters Are Time Machines

"Trek" time travel is usually a dramatic event. In "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," Kirk and his crew went back to the 20th century by getting a stolen Klingon Bird-of-Prey to perform a "slingshot" maneuver around the sun, creating a time warp. The effort nearly destroyed the ship, but it got the job done.

Of course, if you don't have the movie budget — er, starship — to perform such a feat, just use the transporter. In the "Deep Space Nine" Season 3 two-part storyline "Past Tense," a transporter accident involving temporal altering chroniton particles sent Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks), Doctor Bashir, and Lieutenant Commander Dax (Terry Farrell) to the 21st century where they accidentally interfered with a key historical event, threatening to erase their future.

Meanwhile,  Chief O'Brien (Colm Meany) and Major Kira managed to use a limited supply of chronitons to travel through time and locate their missing crew members. They ended up briefly visiting 1930, and even swung by 1967 to get flowers from some hippies, before finally hitting the right date. 

Such tech would be greatly refined by the 29th century, when the Federation included fleets of "timeships" in Starfleet that possessed temporal displacement drives and temporal rifts to travel through time, allowing them to  essentially beam people to any point in history.

Transporters Can Take You to Alternate Realities

As if ending up in the wrong place isn't bad enough, some transporter accidents can place you in an entirely different universe — and not a very fun one at that. 

In the classic Season 2 "Star Trek” episode, "Mirror, Mirror," Kirk and several other crew members re-materialized in a " Mirror Universe " where the benevolent Federation was the planet-conquering "Terran Empire." Kirk and his crew needed to pretend to be their evil counterparts, since any traitors to the empire would be placed in "agony booths" of torture that made folks wish they were dead.

Meanwhile, the Mirror Universe versions of Kirk and his crew appeared in the "Prime" Star Trek universe and were thrown into the Enterprise's brig. Fortunately, the two crews managed to switch places, with the "Prime" Kirk making the "Mirror" Spock consider reforming the Terran Empire.

While this appeared to be a random transporter accident, by the 24th century, Mirror Universe engineers managed to upgrade their transporters to allow people to crossover to the "Prime" universe at will. This led to multiple episodes in "Deep Space Nine" where mainstream characters visited the alternate reality and even formed friendships with some of their Mirror Universe counterparts.

People Have Faked Their Deaths via Transporter Accidents

Want to know how common transporter accidents really are? As it turns out, one Romulan spy felt this sort of death was so prevalent in Starfleet that she staged her own transporter death.

In the "Next Generation" Season 4 episode " Data's Day ," a Vulcan ambassador (Sierra Pecheur) apparently died in a transporter accident even though the equipment appeared to be functioning perfectly. Data (Brent Spiner) investigated, discovering bits of organic matter that arrived in transport were replicated, leading him to deduce that the "Vulcan" ambassador was actually a Romulan spy who used the Enterprise to rendezvous with her people and had the replicated material of her "dead body" beamed onto their ship to fake her cover identity's death.

While the spy's deception was discovered, not every Starfleet crew has people like Data or Doctor Crusher who can investigate so thoroughly. Given this, maybe transporter accidents really aren't so common. Perhaps, most of them are perpetrated by people who just want to start a new life.

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Gaming —

Is beaming down in star trek a death sentence, ahead of discovery , we look to trek's past to suss out specifics of how transporters work..

Xaq Rzetelny - Sep 23, 2017 1:00 pm UTC

Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?

In the 2009 movie Star Trek , Captain Kirk and Sulu plummeted down toward the planet Vulcan without a parachute. “Beam us up, beam us up!” Kirk shouted in desperation. Then at the last second, after a tense scene of Chekov running top speed to the transporter room, their lives were saved moments before they hit the doomed planet’s rocky surface.

These issues have received a lot of attention lately given Trek ’s 50 th Anniversary last year and the series' impending return to TV. Not to mention, in the real world scientists have found recent success in quantum teleporting a particle’s information farther than before (which isn’t the same thing, but still). So while it seems like Trek 's   transporter conundrum has never had a satisfying resolution, we thought we’d take a renewed crack at it.

The transporter from Star Trek's original pilot episode, "The Cage."

Establishing a lock

Trek has always depicted characters who are hesitant to use the transporter, from Dr. McCoy to the entire crew of  Enterprise . "You’re always on the side of, 'those guys are just silly, you gotta trust the future!'" said Jordan Hoffman, a film critic and host of  Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast . "We trust the warp engines and all the other high tech of Star Trek, so why wouldn’t [we] trust the transporter?"

Hoffman points out the first work to express real doubt about the continuity of personhood was the novel Spock Must Die  by James Blish, which "played coy" about whether it's really you on the other end of the transporter. To address the questions this raised, a good place to start is by looking at what the transporter actually does.

According to the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual , when a person steps onto the transporter pad, the computer uses “molecular imaging scanners” to scan his or her body, before the person is converted into a “subatomically debonded matter stream.” In other words, a crew member is taken apart piece by piece, breaking apart the bonds between individual atoms. Then, particles are streamed into a “pattern buffer," where they remain briefly before being sent to their destination.

transporter beam star trek enterprise

This sounds an awful lot like death . In fact, it’s even more death-y than conventional death where, after the body’s processes have stopped, the body slowly decomposes. The effect is the same—the pieces of you come apart—the transporter’s just a lot more efficient at it.

Further Reading

Once the matter stream arrives at its destination, the person is somehow “rematerialized” or put back together. While the transporter tends to use the person’s atoms to reconstruct a human, it really doesn’t have to. The machine could use totally different atoms, and the effect would be exactly the same.

In fact, in the Deep Space Nine episode “ Our Man Bashir," Captain Sisko and a few other officers are nearly lost during a transporter accident. They beam out from their sabotaged runabout at the last second, but the transporter malfunctions and their patterns must be sent into the station’s computer somehow to save them. Their physical bodies are saved as holographic characters in Dr. Bashir’s holosuite program. Later in the episode, they’re reconstituted using the patterns stored in the holodeck—almost certainly with entirely new atoms.

That sounds an awful lot like a copy—or like a new person. If the transporter is just scanning your data and creating an identical copy somewhere else, then by any reasonable definition, the original person is dead. By analogy, consider a car model. Many cars are produced by the same manufacturer, all from the same design. There’s no way to tell these cars apart, but they’re not the same car.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down.

Measure of a man (or other lifeform)

This particular technicality opens a philosophical can of “ gagh , ” which is beyond the scope of this article to fully address and may even be partially subjective (and thus fundamentally unresolvable). For one thing, our bodies grow and change over the course of our lives. Cells multiply, die, and are replaced. Even the brain is no exception.

“There is plenty of change in the brain during development, though birth of new neurons seem to be pretty much restricted to being produced in the dentate gyrus after birth,” Patricia Churchland, neuro-philosopher with the University of California, San Diego, told Ars.  “But there is pruning back (especially in early adolescence), as well as massive sprouting of the neurons you are born with.”

This makes a person a bit like a paintbrush whose head and whose handle will both be replaced at different times. Is it still the same brush? While the brain is a bit more complex than that, there certainly is quite a bit of overhauling going on across a person’s life. According to Churchland, “The brain grows about [five times] from birth to adolescence. It makes about a million synapses per second in the first two years after birth," she said. "In early development, a child can lose a whole hemisphere without being changed into a new person. Later in development, lesions can have a greater effect on personality, mobility and cognition, depending on the location of the lesion.”

But at least in everyday language, we still consider ourselves to be the same person from birth to death. And whether or not that’s a valid standard by which to consider oneself the same person, for our purposes, we’ll use this standard of everyday language. So, the question we’re really asking is, “Is a transported person still the same person, to the extent that we’re the same people throughout our lives?” This gives us a clearer criterion on which to assess the question of the transporter.

There’s another, more famous version of the paintbrush example: a thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus . Theseus wants to keep his ship in tip-top shape, so whenever a board rots, he replaces it with a new one and keeps doing so until none of the original planks remain. Is it still the same ship? By our standards, it clearly is. The pieces have been replaced, but there was a continuity in the ship’s structure between them.

If, however, we destroy the ship but mail its blueprints somewhere else and then build a new, identical ship, it’s not the same ship. It’s a separate ship built from the same blueprints. It doesn’t even matter whether you use the same planks or not. So where does the transporter fit in, again?

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Screen Rant

Every star trek character saved by the transporters.

Transporters are not only safe for travel, but the pattern buffer has been the key to saving the lives of some of the biggest Star Trek characters.

The transporter technology in Star Trek has saved many lives - and not just by beaming characters out of dangerous situations. Transporters convert matter into energy to be beamed to a different location, where it is reconstituted. As part of the transporter process, the matter is backed up in pattern buffers, a failsafe that has saved the lives of many Star Trek characters. It's these safety functions that led USS Enterprise-D Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) to assure the transporter-phobic Reginald Barclay (Dwight Schultz) that it was the safest way to travel in the 24th century.

Barclay was right to be skeptical, however, as transporter malfunctions have created doppelgangers of beloved Star Trek characters or new hybrid lifeforms like the doomed half-Vulcan, half-Talaxian Tuvix from Star Trek: Voyager . More horrifically, a malfunction with the pattern buffers led to the gruesome death of Commander Sonak (Jon Rashad Kamal) in Star Trek: The Motion Picture . However, these are exceptions that prove the rule. Transporters fitted to every Starfleet vessel, and their safety features have saved the lives of multiple officers. Here's every Star Trek character that was rescued by being stored in the transporter pattern buffers.

RELATED: Star Trek: Every Version Of The Enterprise Explained

6 Scotty In Star Trek: The Next Generation - "Relics"

Generally, the patterns stored in the buffers would not be stored indefinitely and were presumably wiped after each successful transport was completed. Fittingly, the only recorded instance of a Starfleet officer being stored beyond the maximum storage time was the legendary Enterprise engineer Montgomery Scott (James Doohan). In Star Trek: The Next Generation season 6, episode 4, "Relics", the Enterprise discovers the USS Jenolan, which had been missing for 75 years. A brilliant engineer and miracle worker, Scotty had worked out how to store a pattern in the buffer indefinitely, with the intention of saving the life of both him and his fellow officer.

However, rescue took longer than Scotty expected, and he rematerialized in the 24th century, which he felt out of touch with. After helping to rescue the Enterprise-D from the same fate that befell the Jenolan, Scotty realized he was still useful and set out to make a difference in the galaxy. Thanks to the transporters, Scotty got to join a brand new Star Trek era.

5 Lt. Barclay And The USS Yosemite Crew In TNG - "Realm Of Fear"

Reg Barclay's fear of the transporters put him in good company. Star Trek 's Doctor McCoy feared beaming up too but in TNG season 6, episode 2, "Realm of Fear", Barclay confronts his fear and the transporter ends up saving his life. Beaming over to the stricken USS Yosemite, the Enterprise away team discovers dead and missing crew members. After beaming back from the Yosemite, Barclay begins experiencing strange side effects after seeing a strange creature in the transporter beam. It turns out that Barclay has absorbed quasi-energy microbes that could have fatal consequences.

Deciding to recalibrate the transporter's bio-filters, Geordi, O'Brien (Colm Meaney), and Barclay attempt to get rid of the quasi-energy microbes. While in the beam for one last time, Barclay realizes the creatures he's seeing in the transporter beam are the missing Yosemite crew members, trapped in the beam, thanks to their own over-zealous recalibration of the bio-filters. After sending Lt. Worf (Michael Dorn) to rescue the remaining crew, Barclay speculated that the power from the quasi-energy microbes kept the molecular patterns of the Yosemite crew from degrading, saving their lives.

RELATED: Star Trek: Why Geordi Lost His VISOR And Got Robot Eyes

4 The DS9 Crew In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - "Our Man Bashir"

In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 4, episode 9, "Our Man Bashir", an explosion on a sabotaged Runabout left the majority of the DS9 crew suspended in the transporter buffer. In order to keep the crew alive, the station's computer was ordered to keep their patterns stable by erasing all non-essential memory. However, a power outage on the former Cardassian space station led to the crew's patterns being reconstituted in the holodeck as characters in a James Bond -esque holosuite program).

Setting up Bashir's Section 31 story in later seasons of DS9, the station's doctor is indulging his secret agent fantasy when he realizes something has gone wrong. Among the comical touches of the episode, the holosuite program cast Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) as a Bond villain and both Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) and Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) as Bashir's love interests. It was up to Bashir to keep the program running, and the characters alive for long enough for Nog and the DS9 engineers to figure out how to successfully rematerialize them aboard the USS Defiant.

3 The Brenari Refugees In Star Trek: Voyager - "Counterpoint"

In Star Trek: Voyager season 5, episode 10, "Counterpoint", Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) used the transporter buffers to transport a group of telepathic refugees through a hostile region of space where telepathy was illegal. Subject to routine checks by the oppressive Devore Imperium, the Brenari's patterns were stored in the buffers during these searches. As Star Trek: Prodigy 's Voyager callback revealed, this kindness led to a Brenari joining Starfleet and repaying Janeway by aiding her in her and the Prodigy crew's attempts to avert Starfleet being decimated by the Vau N'Akat's weapon.

The repeated use of the transporters began to have a negative effect on the Brenari, with many of the refugees being treated for cellular degradation. Eventually, an alternative solution was offered when the Devore realized what Voyager was doing with their transporter buffers. As the Devore materialized the stored crates, they discovered vegetables, while the Brenari escaped through a wormhole in shuttle crafts, headed for a better future. The transporters may have had life-threatening side effects, but without them, the Brenari's lives would have been doomed.

RELATED: Admiral Janeway Just Proved Star Trek's Most Important Virtue

2 The USS Discovery Crew In Star Trek: Discovery - "Stormy Weather"

Star Trek: Discovery 's Dark Matter Anomaly was the devastating weapon introduced in season 4, causing cataclysmic destruction across the Federation. In Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 6, "Stormy Weather", the DMA created a subspace rift that would expose the USS Discovery to unbearably high levels of heat that the crew could not possibly survive. In order to prevent putting her crew at risk, Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) ordered her crew to be stored inside the transporter buffers while she and Zora (Annabelle Wallis) - the ship's sentient A.I. - piloted Discovery through the treacherous rift.

Burnham stayed behind on the Discovery bridge in an Environmental suit, so that life support could be turned off to conserve power to keep the patterns from degrading. The heat eventually got the better of Burnham, who passed out, but not before she ordered Zora to rematerialize the crew of the Discovery once it was safe to do so. It remains the most ambitious use of the transporter buffers in the Star Trek canon, perhaps made possible by the advances in 32nd-century technology.

1 Rukia M'Benga In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1, episode 3, "Ghosts of Illyria", it was revealed that the Enterprise's doctor, Joseph M'Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) was using the medical transporters for a heartbreaking purpose. His young daughter Rukiya (Sage Arrindell) was diagnosed with Cygnokemia, a terminal illness that, even in the 23rd century's advanced society, had no known cure. While M'Benga hoped to either create a cure or discover one during his travels on the Enterprise, he stored Rukiya in the transporter buffers to give her more time.

M'Benga, a single father like Benjamin Sisko , was fully aware of the degradation that Janeway and the crew would experience a century later with the Brenari. Therefore, he took her out of the buffer sparingly, with the intention of reading her stories, such as Benny Russell's The Kingdom of Elysian . When the Enterprise encountered the entity known as Debra - named after Rukiya's mother - M'Benga was offered a way to let his daughter live free from illness, a life as pure consciousness. It's a tough call, but M'Benga ultimately decides to let his daughter go. If it weren't for Star Trek 's transporter technology, Rukiya would have died long before she was offered a new life by the entity.

More: Every New Version Of Warp Drive In Star Trek

Transporters, Replicators and Phasing FAQ

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1. Transporters

2. replicators.

  • 5. References

"How does the transporter work?"

While there is no absolute canonical answer, we can piece one together from various clues, that fits nearly everything seen on-screen, and in the TNG Tech Manual.

We have some evidence of the inner workings of transporters, but not much. They employ Heisenberg compensators, pattern buffers, phase transition coils, Biofilters, matter streams, confinement beams, and matter-energy converters, and phased matter. As for what they do, we know that you are conscious during transport ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , "Realm of Fear" [TNG] ), but can also be held in stasis ( "Day of the Dove" [TOS] , "Relics" [TNG] ). Further, while in transport, you appear whole to yourself.

I hypothesize that the Annular Confinement Beam first locks onto, then disassembles the subject into phased matter, via the phase transition coils, causing it to take on a very energy-like state somewhat akin to plasma, called phased matter. The matter stream is then fed into the pattern buffer, piped through wave-guide conduits to one of the beam emitters on the hull of the starship, and then relayed to a point on the ground where the ACB reconstructs the subject.

"Excuse me, Annular Confinement Beam?"

Yes. The ACB is where the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty!" comes from. The beam serves two purposes: The first is to maintain a "lock" on the subject, so the transporter knows what to beam out, and what to leave behind. The second purpose is to do the actual transporting, whilst keeping the subject in one piece subjectively.

"How does the transporter know what to take and what to leave?"

In "The Enterprise Incident" [TOS] , the ship's scanners are able to differentiate a Vulcan from all of the Romulans aboard another ship. They are very sensitive, but also take a great deal of time. In many episodes, this sensitivity is not used. However, to scan at that level of resolution would take perhaps far longer than the crew has.

In any case, the ACB generators are able to scan the target subject, and either using some best-guessing or asking the Transporter Chief, decide what should be transported with the subject.

As one r.a.st.tech poster put it, "One to beam up, hold the bunny slippers." :)

"So what is this pattern thing?"

The pattern buffer is a cyclotron-like tank (TNG:TM) which holds the whirling matrix of phased matter in the ACB while the subject is beamed out and beamed in. In order to keep track of where every part of the subject is, the computer constructs a pattern to keep track of what bits of the stream end up where.

An analogy would be the [left->right->left&down]->top pattern a television electron gun follows to paint a picture on the phosphors of the screen. The television (we're assuming an old analog no-frills model) doesn't know and can't possibly store the information needed to construct a one-hour program, but it has a pattern, and uses a modulated matter (electron) stream to do it.

In "Lonely Among Us" [TNG] , Picard is recovered from being beamed away as pure energy. The computer is able to reconstruct Picard by using the pattern it had stored, working with the phased matter stream that Picard's energy state itself supplied. Since the pattern was pre-transport, the reformed Picard had no memories of the excursion.

Similar to this is the transporter ID trace, which is kept for verification purposes for a long time after transport. This is probably a highly compressed sample of the pattern, plus the name of the transportee, logs of the transport cycle, etc. (TNG "Data's Day" .)

"So what is a Heisenberg Compensator?"

As Mike Okuda said when asked by Time (28 Nov 1994), "How do the Heisenberg compensators work ?" "They work just fine, thank you." [Benjamin Chee]

In physics, the Heisenberg Principle states that you cannot know both the position of a subatomic particle and its momentum to a precise degree. The more you know about one, the less you know can about the other.

This comes into play when you consider that to know where everything is coming from and going to, you pretty much have to know near-exactly where everything is. By the 24th century, evidently, that's no longer a problem. The Heisenberg Compensators are probably used to keep everything in the matter stream exactly where it should be.

Note that this doesn't mean that the Heisenberg Compensators tell you the vital statistics of the particle; they could very well just compensate for not knowing them and keep the system working just fine, thank you.

"How does that Biofilter gadget work?"

The Biofilter is a good clue as to how the transport patterns work. The filter looks for elements of the pattern which aren't found in normal beings/equipment, or those of known viruses and bacteria. It can simply erase those parts of the pattern, and those parts of the matter stream won't beam back in.

In "Unnatural Selection" [TNG] , Pulaski is restored from an aged state by the use of the Biofilter. If Pulaski's altered DNA could be tagged as unwanted, the pattern could be tweaked to restore the DNA (its pretty much all the same molecules anyway, just shuffle some base-pairs around). As for her recovering instantly... well, it's a TV show.

"What is pattern degradation?"

The pattern is probably highly complex. Pattern degradation occurs because the Annular Confinement Beams aren't perfect, even with the help of the Heisenberg Compensators. The matter stream comes out of alignment with the computer's pattern predictions for where things should be. Obviously, this is a bad thing.

According to the TNG Tech Manual, a subject can be suspended in transport for up to 420 seconds before the degradation is too severe to attempt to reform the transportee. They push close to this limit in "Realm of Fear" .

In "Relics" [TNG] , we see that by keeping the transport controller locked in a diagnostic loop, pattern degradation is kept to a minimum - even with an old-style transporter, only 0.003% of the pattern was lost after 75 years in stasis.

In "Realm of Fear" [TNG] , the most extraordinary development is the reconstruction of the lost crew, and their appearance as the giant slugs while in transport. I suspect that the phased-matter "bugs" which reside in the plasma environment act as a natural ACB, maintaining the pattern of those "lost" in transport. The computer is able to use the Biofilter to rebuild the patterns and restore the individuals.

"Where are you during transport?"

Inside the ACB. "Realm of Fear" [TNG] shows what it looks like - lots of blue and silver sparkles. If you mean from an outside observer's point of view, you're either in one of the pattern buffers, or in transit to the beaming coordinates. In "The Gamesters of Triskelion" [TOS] , Kirk and crew are lost during transport. In the technobabble that follows, Spock and McCoy discuss whether recovering the lost crewmembers from the transport beam, thought to be zipping away from the Enterprise, is possible. This means that if the beam was somehow suspended, a smart computer could reconstruct the pattern and beam you back in. This might be what happened in "Realm of Fear" [TNG] . If the ACB environment is similar to a plasma field, the bugs could act as stabilizers. Long shot, but hey.

"So was Scotty conscious for 75 years?" ( "Relics" [TNG] )

Nope, or he would have starved - if your brain is working, your heart must be pumping blood, and it needs energy from somewhere. There are three possibilities for how this was accomplished:

1) All transporters have an optional "stasis" switch, that locks the pattern of the subject during transport. In other words, they are frozen on a quantum level.

2) Old-style transporters, as seen in TOS, always transported the subject under stasis. From watching the show, we can see the two stages in a bream-out. First, a sparkly pattern appears over the chest of the subject, and spreads to cover them. They are sometimes seen to move during this process. Then they start to have these yellow blobs appear as they fade out. They don't move during this second stage. We can speculate that there's a stasis field employed for some reason (technological limitations, safety, etc) during the actual transport stage with old technology. This style of transporter was present on the Jenolan ( "Relics" ), but is now obsolete.

3) Putting the transport controller in a diagnostic loop imposes stasis on the subject, as a byproduct of the process by which degradation is minimized.

Choice (3) is the most appealing to me.

"What happens to the air when you beam in or beam out?"

It is likely that during the beam-out process, air simply diffuses into the space previously occupied by the subject under transport. This happens slowly enough that there would be no pop, or any other sound, except perhaps a small hum or tinkling noise, depending on the dynamics of air interacting with the ACB.

As for beaming in, the ACB lock on the target site probably gives the air a gentle "shove" out of the way, again with minimal noise. In the movies, we do see the beam sweep outwards before the subject materializes.

"Why do people who are sitting end when beamed out end up standing when beamed in?" ( "Tomorrow is Yesterday" [TOS] )

Something similar happened in "Bloodlines" [TNG] when Picard's "son" was beamed off a cliff face and ended up standing on the transporter pad. This implies that either the transporter can rearrange the various components of your body, which implies that it has a deep knowledge of biology (and this isn't supported), or that whilst in transport, some sort of force field "nudges" the transportee into an appropriate body position. So if you beam from the smooth transporter pad to bumpy "Planet Hell", the surface you feel under your feet while in transport distorts; you have time to adjust your balance before you materialize. (This has been suggested a number of times on rec.arts.startrek.tech, most recently by Ron Klapperich.)

"How can you transport without a transporter at the receiving end?"

According to the TNG Tech Manual, the Enterprise hull sports emitter array pads at various sites on its surface. They utilize "long-range virtual-focus molecular imaging scanners" to handle remote disassembly of the subject, and facilitate reassembly. The ACB is tightly focused onto the target area from the ship. This is limited - in the TNG era, 40,000 km is the safe range for transport.

"So why in TOS episodes/classic films did they beam from transporter room to transporter room?"

Intra-ship transport in the TOS era was not very reliable. ( "Day of the Dove" [TOS] ) Likely, when two compatible transport systems were available, the surface emitters could "interlock", and the pattern buffers would synchronize. One transport system would handle the dematerialization, and hand off the ACB to the receiving end for the rematerialization. This is much safer and likely requires less energy, and can be used to get around certain environmental difficulties. ( "Realm of Fear" [TNG] )

"What happened at the start of Star Trek: The Motion Picture then, if it's so safe?"

When the power on the receiving end of the transport failed, the transport computer on the Enterprise was unable to maintain the pattern integrity of the matter stream. This is akin to catastrophic degradation of the pattern. Kirk said "Boost your matter gain, we need more signal!" - perhaps indicating that the ACB could have been used to reconstruct the pattern. In any case, the hand-off appeared to have been nearly complete when the transportees began reforming on the pad. Since the Enterprise could not handle the transport, the matter stream was sent back to Starfleet HQ, in the hopes that enough of the pattern remained in the ACB to reconstruct them at the sending site. It wasn't, and the subjects died shortly thereafter.

"And why can't Trills be transported?" ( "The Host" [TNG] )

Odan said that transport would kill him. However, in "The Alternate" [DS9] , Dax is transported by a Federation transporter (aboard the Runabout), and suffers no ill effects. Since then she's been transported many times. There are a few possibilities.

The first is that Odan did not wish to reveal that he was a host/symbiont pair, perhaps because the knowledge would disrupt the negotiations, lead to suspicion, or because all Trill were keeping their symbiont nature a secret at the time.

The second is that, not knowing that Trill are a joined species, the Biofilter might identify the slug part as a parasite and delete the pattern, killing both the host and the symbiont. If this is true, then simply by turning off/adjusting the Biofilter, Trills can transport like anyone else. Surely, once the unique nature of the Trill was revealed, the all Federation Biofilters would be reprogrammed to ignore the symbiont.

The third is that some Trill symbionts would be damaged by the transport process, and others wouldn't be. This is proposed in the Encyclopedia. Another possibility is that the link in an injured Trill (host or symbiont) is susceptible to damage during transport.

"Can you transport through subspace?"

In "Data's Day" [TNG] , the use of a subspace carrier wave was mentioned as the method by which the transporter beam propagates.

In "Bloodlines" [TNG] , Bok has a subspace transporter, a technology which was researched but later abandoned by the Federation. The range is at least 300 billion kilometers, and at most several light years and the subject is put into a state of molecular flux. Doesn't sound healthy. How is this different than normal transport? Probably just a deeper level of subspace.

In "The High Ground" [TNG] , transporting through folded space using a subspace field coil made for instant, untraceable transports. The only problem is that it causes slow, irreversible genetic damage to the transport subject. It is a cumulative effect: one or two transports would be harmless, but dozens or hundreds are fatal. The Federation experimented with such technology in the 23rd Century, so this may be what Bok was using as well. (Joseph M. Osborne)

"Why can't you be transported through shields?"

If you could be transported through shields, they'd be pretty lousy shields. Just transport a bomb or boarding party over.

Benjamin Chee:

Just a thought here. Says in the TNG Tech Manual that phasers may be fired one-way through the ship's own shields due to EM polarization (whatever that means). If this holds true for other forms of wavicle energy, then one might be able to transport out one-way through shields, too.

Benjamin points out that in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock , Klingons transport while their Bird of Prey is cloaked, yet in "The Search, Part 1" [DS9] the Defiant has to decloak to transport.

Greg Moseley suggests that the differences between the Klingon and Romulan cloaking devices may be responsible for the discrepancy; the Defiant cloak is on loan from the Romulans in return for information about the Gamma Quadrant.

Benjamin adds that in "The Die Is Cast" [DS9] a Romulan ship decloaks on top of a runabout before it can beam the occupants aboard. But in "The Way of the Warrior" [DS9] an entire fleet of Klingon ships stays cloaked until the battle warms up.

And finally, more wisdom from Benjamin:

One more point - the Klingon clunker in Generations had to decloak before it could beam Soran aboard, didn't it ? We never really were told why nor do we have much to conjecture from, but this is indeed an exception to the rule. In a mail to Mike Okuda, he also admitted that they never really kept track of the cloaks - might have been coincidence all the way up till Generations .

"But what about the time O'Brien used the shield frequencies..." ( "The Wounded" [TNG] )

Shields must allow some energy through to allow sensors to operate. To be safe, these frequencies are cycled, allowing sensor windows. By knowing the shield cycles, and the right frequencies, it is be possible to adjust the transporter to work at those few open frequencies, and slip past the shields.

Of course, if the destination ship detects you trying to beam through, they can alter the shield frequencies and end the transport suddenly, with rather messy results.

"What about in "Relics" [TNG] - they didn't do anything special!"

One would imagine that shield and transporter technologies are in a constant development race, as sensors and cloaks are. The "enemy" is always trying to figure out a way to transport through your shields, and thus you must always be trying to improve your shields to block this. Hence, any 70-year-old shields, like those on the Jenolan, would be practically transparent to modern transporters.

Alternately, Geordi and Scotty knew that the Enterprise would have to beam them off the ship, and turned off the "transport blocking" frequencies in the shields.

"Could surgery be performed with a transporter?"

It all depends on the surgery. For example - could I suspend you in transport, reform the pattern so that your arm is no longer broken, your skin is no longer cut, etc? Yes. But in sickbay they already have machines which do it near-instantly, and don't take the massive resources of the transporter.

For such things as removing a tumor, you must consider what replaces the object being transported away. In all likelihood, a vacuum. Having a small vacuum appear inside you body is probably more deadly than the tumor was in the first place. It has been suggested that you could synchronize two ACBs and beam in a saline solution in place of the tumor you are transporting out, but again, why bother? There are already medical devices which probably use micro-transporter technology to effect the surgery.

In "Deadlock" [VOY], a baby (Naomi Wildman) was transported out of its mother when there were complications during delivery - so apparently this sort of thing is performed in emergency situations when the normal medical resources are inadequate for the task. (Thanks to Eur van Andel for pointing that out.)

"What about souls?"

Heh. Well, if you've already decided that Star Trek transporters and souls don't get along, then accept that your position has been made abundantly clear in the past, and don't bother to follow-up. Souls aren't precluded by transporters, they just require that somehow, souls can (1) "tag along" with the physical body through transport, (2) stay in stasis along with a body, and (3) be duplicated. Since there isn't (and many maintain, there can't be) any way of analyzing this hypothetical "soul", it makes little sense to argue about what it can and cannot do.

"Can you transport while in Warp?"

Yes. According to the TM and "Best of Both Worlds, Part II" , if you're in Warp you can transport as long as you are both at the same Warp value. The TM says "integral warp value", but in BOBW2 they were chasing the Borg ship at, I believe, warp 9.6 or something similar.

H. Peter Anvin offers:

I think the intent of the phrase "integral warp value" means anything with the same integer number, i.e. 8 <= warp < 9; so in BOBW2 the big E would only have had to exceed Warp 9 in order to make this possible. The TM makes it abundantly clear that a transition occurs at integral warp factors (and we deduce that to be the reason the warp scale changed between TOS and TNG) so I think it makes a lot of sense.

Possible. However, doesn't O'Brien say "Matching warp velocities for transport" or something quite similar? They'd have to be going at nearly the same velocity already to keep up with the Borg ship, so matching velocities could only refer to fine tuning.

In "Force of Nature" [TNG] , they transport from a stationary ship while falling out of warp in an area of massive subspace instability. It could be that since they aren't actively generating a warp field of any level they can get away with transport.

"What happened in "The Schizoid Man" [TNG] ?"

The Enterprise dropped out of warp for a fraction of a second, and engage the transport system. Troi reported feeling like she was inside the wall for a moment. It appears that the matter stream falls out of the ACB before transport is quite complete. Definitely a nasty thing if things aren't perfect.

And in the transporter weaponry category:

Transporter Scramblers: (from "Nor the Battle to the Strong" [DS9] & "The Darkness and the Light" [DS9] )

Transporter Scramblers are electronic countermeasures that prohibit transporter activity in a given area. There are no known ways to overcome the scrambler, except through sabotage. Small scramblers can protect a few rooms of a ship or station, while larger arrays can block an entire planet. They are a standard part of Klingon ground assaults and are used in the protection of certain spaces of DS9.

Remat Detonators: (from "The Darkness and the Light" [DS9] )

Remat Detonators are a Romulan weapon, probably invented by the Tal Shiar, that destroys a transporter pattern during rematerialization. They are very small, only 2 cubic millimeters, and are hidden on the person of the victim. Remat detonators are currently available on the black market as assassination weapons. They are also undetectable to most scans.

Thanks to Joseph M. Osborne for these summaries.

"How do replicators work?"

Replicators are based on transporter technology. A sample object is first "scanned" into the memory of a computer. Because even a simple object takes up an enormous amount of memory, the object is only resolved at a molecular level, not a quantum level. Further, the data must be compressed using a lossy algorithm, meaning that small, undetectable approximations are made to the data. This gives the computer a pattern to create a duplicate of the original. (TNG TM)

Starships have a small supply of bulk material that is constantly recycled into needed materials and items. When a request is made at a replicator terminal, the wave-guide conduit system on the ship relays a small amount of bulk material to the replicator, which uses it to create the materials called for in the pattern. The object is then beamed in at the terminal.

"Can replicators transmute elements?"

Yes... sort of. There have been occasions on the show where some required element cannot be replicated. The Tech Manual talks about "quantum transformational manipulation", so they can do some quantum twiddling to get new elements. However, it also says that the energy costs are high for all forms of replication, and that food, since it's usually just different arrangements of the same basic things (water, proteins, lipids), is more practical to replicate from bulk matter than to store.

In "Night Terrors" [TNG] , when a certain substance is needed, Data says "We no longer have the power to reproduce complex elements in the replicator." This is evidence for the above.

"What about gold-pressed latinum?"

In "Who Mourns for Morn?" [DS9] , latinum is described as a clear, viscous liquid. Morn has kept latinum in his second stomach for years. It's pressed into gold to to handle it better. The gold is worth nothing. 30 cc latinum is about 200 bricks worth. [Eur van Andel]

So, why is it valuable? See above about energy costs and certain elements - possibly latinum is a stable element that 24th century technology can't transmute. Or, alternatively, it could take *exactly* (perhaps by definition) the same amount of energy to replicate as it takes to mine/ manufacture, making it a good standard for monetary transactions.

Here's what Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach came up with when confronted with this question in the book The Making of DS9 , c/o Benjamin Chee:

Q: How could it be so valuable if it could be churned out by any replicator ? RS: Oh, well, Mike and I have had discussions about things like this... it might be that, you know, that the particular molecular structure just doesn't, you know, doesn't - Mike? Why can't you replicate latinum ? MO: Uh, it's because - uh, when - uh, it's because the um, the, uh, uh, the valence system and the molecular structure are, are arranged - the, uh, the, the, uh, replicator reads certain valence patterns - it recognizes that, that those are... copyguarded ! Q: Copyguarded ? RS: Copyguarded! Oh, they're, they're 'nudged', sort of 'nudged quanta' and if they're - MO: Hey, we talked about this before. RS: That's right, that's right. Yes, and if they're, they're polarized in the, in the X plane, then they're, they're okay. If they're polarized in the Y-Z plane, then they're bogus. MO: Right.

Tom Luton writes:

The novel "Balance of Power" (TNG #33, written by Dafydd Ab Hugh) has a detailed description of why latinum cannot be replicated. I don't have the novel with me, but as far as I can remember, latinum has a highly complex molecular structure, and is extremely similar to Chasenum. Any attempt to replicate Latinum will result in the formation of Chasenum (I've forgotten the specific details, and I don't even think I've spelled the name of the material correctly).   

"What happens to the glasses when they're done with them?"

The empty glasses, plates, etc, are put back in the replicator terminal ( "Timescape" [TNG] ), and returned as raw materials to the bulk matter store. It would make sense if they were only disassembled on the molecular level, as the energy needed to reform new glasses would be much lower than if they were broken down to the atomic level or quantum level.

"Why don't they use replicators to do instant ship repair?"

For minor repair, it might be feasible, but we rarely see any sort of repairs actually being done. When Geordi says "30 minutes at least, Captain", they might be replicating various components and using a transporter-effected swap-out. Recall, however, that the transporters and replicators use a lot of power. The replicators go offline in Alert situations, for example. It would be foolish to rely on such a system to repair the ship in emergencies, but it is doubtless used at other time.

For large scale repair, I think the TNG Tech Manual says it best: "... if you could make a starship at the touch of a button, you wouldn't need to..."

"Can you make two Datas with the transporter?"

No. It is not possible (with 24th century technology, at least) to replicate something at the quantum level. First, the amount of information needed to define a living, thinking being at that level of detail is incredibly large, far surpassing the computer capacity of any 24th century database. (TNG TM)

Presumably, Data and other Soong-type androids which use positronic brains have components which function at a quantum, or sub-molecular level which cannot be easily replicated.

Secondly, there is no way to scan at quantum resolution without destroying the subject. The transporter ACB need not know the precise details of every particle being transported - where they are and what they are doing is enough. Further, attempting to retrieve such information from the ACB would destroy it.

To duplicate a living being, a hypothetical effect, which I call an Annular Confinement Beam-Splitter, would be needed. As the ACB was passed through it, along with a supply of raw phased matter, it would duplicate the ACB's contents in the raw stream.

"Hey! What about "The Enemy Within" and "Second Chances" ?"

For better or worse, no such device has been intentionally created by 24th century science. However, in "The Enemy Within" [TOS] , Kirk's duplication may have been caused by some accidental effect which caused an ACBS to form in the normal transporter mechanism, with disastrous results. The Encyclopedia says that damage to the the transporter's ionizer was the cause of the split.

In "Second Chances" [TNG] , the mechanism by which Riker is duplicated is explained in detail. During transport through severe atmospheric interference, the transporter chief locked onto Riker's signal with a second ACB. When it turned out not to be needed, the second signal was abandoned. The atmospheric interference caused the second ACB to be reflected back to the planet, and somehow the matter stream was duplicated, using phased matter from the atmospheric interference effect to provide the duplicate mass.

"What about the time when... ?"

Star Trek has "broken" the rules of transporters a number of times. There are very few glaring examples of misuse of the transporter as a plot device to save the day, but the worst include:

"Rascals" [TNG] - Picard, Keiko, Guinan and Ro are turned into children in a freak transporter accident, and later restored. I won't even try. First off, the biology used in this episode is pure BS. Secondly, if a quick fix like this can alter the aging process, then by doing it intentionally, no-one will ever grow old and die again. Amusing episode, but it gets a thumbs down in the Treknology category.

"Unnatural Selection" [TNG] - The transporter magically rejuvenates Pulaski. While the mechanism by which her cure works is relatively sound, the fact that she recovers instantly is anomalous. (See "Man of The People" [TNG] for a similar insta-heal.) Better to just not ask.

"Tomorrow Is Yesterday" [TOS] - Somehow, the transporter is able to erase the memories of people by transporting a newer version of themselves over top of an older version. Talk about saving the day by transporter abuse!

"The Enemy Within" [TOS] - While I can buy the duplication effect, and maybe even the two disparate personas of the two Kirks, I think the recombination of the two was pushing the technology a little bit.

"What is phasing? It seems to be mentioned everywhere these days!"

Star Trek seems to have this notion of "phased" as a state or quality of matter and energy. Things can be offset slightly in a time-like dimension from our "phase" of the universe. The idea being that if you and I have different "phases" we can't interact with each other without using special particles or fields or the usual [TECH].

This is borne out in "The Mind's Eye" [TNG], where Geordi lists the five states in Sub-Quantum Transformational Relativity:

  • asymmetrical

Phasers set on kill appear to work by violently phasing their target into one (or more) different phases. Ouch. This explains rather nicely why they just disappear and don't go "boom". Chronotons, which have been linked to time travel and associated effects, are also mentioned with regards to phasing a few times.

"The Tholian Web" [TOS] - The U.S.S. Defiant and Captain Kirk get trapped in an "interphase" rift, phasing in and out.

"The Next Phase" [TNG] - Geordi and Ro and a Romulan get accidentally phase-cloaked within the Enterprise. They can walk through walls and people. (They don't fall through the floor, though.) A high-intensity sweep with anyons return Geordi and Ro to normal phase.

"Time's Arrow" [TNG] - Phased creatures from Devidia Two are travelling through a portal to 19th Century Earth to steal neural energy. A subspace field can be used to align the phases of the Enterprise crew and the creatures.

"The Pegasus" [TNG] - The Enterprise uses a phase-cloak developed illegally many years ago by the Federation earlier to escape from an asteroid. The cloaking device phases the entire ship.

"Relics" [TNG] - Scotty couples the transporter phase inducers to the pattern buffer to create the suspension effect. Given that transporting involves conversion to a beam of matter and energy, and that you can transport through walls, that beam better be phased or there'll be some big nasty holes whenever people transport.

4. Credits:

5. references:.

See the Reading List FAQ for more details on the reference volumes mentioned above and below.

The question of "what is canon" has been argued for years in the Star Trek newsgroup hierarchy. In the realm of technical discussions, this can be refined to the question of "what evidence is factual, and what is apocryphal". These FAQs follow the currently dominant notion that "canon" is aired live-action material and nothing more, with the caveat that materials produced off-camera by the production crew are often (but not always) reliable predictors of the direction future canonical material will follow, and are therefore granted a special "quasi-canonical" status. Any other material falls into the realm of speculation - it may be perfectly well grounded speculation useful for building up technical arguments, or wild flights of fancy that have no rational basis.

In addition, more recently presented information is considered to supercede old information, unless the weight of the evidence supports the original data. While this may seem highly biased and may be eyed with some skepticism as a form of Orwellian "newthink", it is a more useful predictor of what those directly responsible for the creation of the series are likely to include as canonical material in the future.

For example, the excellent and groundbreaking Star Fleet Technical Manual , by Franz Joseph created in the 1970's was a very well thought out look at the technical world of Starfleet just slightly beyond what was seen in the original series. Unfortunately, and perhaps for purely arbitrary reasons, the future development of "canon" Star Trek diverged from this speculation. This in no way implies that there was anything wrong with that volume or any others, merely that due to later "evidence", it can no longer be regarded as an authoritative overview of Trek technology. On the other hand, the author performed a lot of research to create it, and therefore its speculation should not be dismissed out of hand.

That said, we are dealing with a universe in the process of being created by scores of (usually) non-technical people, aiming to provide weekly entertainment for a mass audience. There are many inconsistencies even amid the canonical material, and often times the wildest speculation on the newsgroup makes more sense than what we see in the episodes.

Canonical material:

  • Star Trek: Voyager [VOY]
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [DS9]
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation [TNG]
  • Star Trek feature films
  • Classic Star Trek [TOS]

Quasi-canonical material:

  • The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future
  • Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual
  • The Making of Star Trek
  • Newsgroup postings
  • Convention presentations
  • Email conversations

Highly regarded, but non-canonical material:

  • Star Trek: The Animated Series [TAS]
  • Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise
  • Star Fleet Technical Manual
  • Starlog's Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Journal
  • Other "reference" guides
  • Novels, incl. novelizations of films and episodes
  • Blueprints, drawings, photographs, models, etc.

Joshua Bell, [email protected]

Star Trek’s Transporter Technology, Explained

Transporters are among the most interesting technology in Star Trek. How exactly is Scotty able to "beam me up?"

Ever since its creation in the late 1960s, Star Trek has been a pinnacle of positive science fiction, envisioning a non-dystopian future where technology has become so advanced that problems that irk mankind today are no longer an issue . World hunger is solved by the unlimited source of food created by a replicator , complex medical diagnostics can take place in a matter of seconds using a tricorder. However, nothing has become such a cornerstone of the many iterations into the franchise as the iconic transporter.

Teleportation has long been a dream of mankind, replacing arduous long-haul flights with a simple matter transportation device. With this gizmo, journeys that would typically take hours can take only seconds. The transporters are used throughout the many iterations into the franchise, from the revolutionary Original Series to the newest addition to the universe, Strange New Worlds . So fundamental are these transporters as a narrative beat that they appear in almost every episode, bar the occasional few. What's more, they often play a key role in solving whatever problem the intrepid adventures of Starfleet face.

RELATED: How Star Trek: The Next Generation Explored Blindness & Accessibility With Geordi LaForge

While there have been a few gizmos and gadgets from the show that have wiggled their way into non-fictional technological creations , unfortunately the transporter is not one of them. Real-world scientists have poured considerable research into it, with successful experiments having already been carried out on a molecular scale, but sadly we are nowhere close to the transporter technology portrayed in the show.

The biggest problem with achieving teleportation is largely down to how advanced and complex most organisms and objects are. Star Trek transporter tech works by breaking down matter such as living organisms, cargo, even gas or liquid-based matter into an energy pattern, in a process that the show calls “dematerialization.” Once each atom is broken down into this pattern, it is “beamed” across to another transporter pad, where it is converted back into matter. This is aptly named “rematerialization.” Interestingly, the famous quote “Beam me up, Scotty”, in reference to the Original Series transporter operator and chord of engineering Montgomery Scott, is actually a misquote, never uttered in the Original Series . The closest occasion was the one time Kirk said “Scotty, beam me up,” years later in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Within the Star Trek universe, there are some limitations to the miraculous technology, such as distance restriction and often an inability to penetrate through shields. There are of course exceptions to these rules, but they are often connected specifically to a particular episodes plot. Writers, as is often the case in long-running TV shows such as this, often break or bend the rules on transporter specifics, so it’s often hard to canonically understand their limitations. In the Original Series it’s noted that it is only possible to transport from one transporter bay to another. However, this rule has been broken multiple times, showing crew members transported from any random location to another, all without the bay. This raises the question as to why they have the designated transporter room to begin with, other than to make grand entrances and create memorable transitions.

While the process sounds simple enough on paper, like sending an email over, the process is riddled with complex problems and potential dangers. It’s no wonder that transporter operators are so highly trained within Starfleet, as the idea of breaking down matter and then reconstructing it in exactly the same way is a daunting task. It is comparable to smashing a vase into tiny pieces, then trying to glue it all back together. Of course, with the wonders of Star Trek technology, this process is vastly automated, but there are still a myriad of problems that can occur.

There have been various episodes devoted to these issues, potentially most notably the Voyager episode “Tuvix”. Tuvok and Neelix, two crew members under the controversial Capt. Janeway, are on an away mission. Upon beaming back to the ship their energy pattern was disrupted, causing it to merge into one pattern and thus rematerialize into one living organism: Tuvix. There kinds of issues are scarily common, and thus there are various characters whom audiences meet across the franchise that are hesitant or even refuse to use transporters.

Transporters are potentially one of the most fascinating technological advancements present within the show, and are often the envy of even modern day audiences. Technology has come ridiculously far since The Original Series first graced televisions, with touch screens, smartphones, and virtual reality all appearing in the real world, and making the old shows feel dated. Transporters, however, along with warp engines and replicators, make even the oldest episodes feel futuristic, setting a standard that has remained relevant more than 50 years later.

MORE: Star Trek: Deep Space 9's Most Heart Wrenching Moment

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transporter (Star Trek)

transporter pad of the  starship Enterprise Trek transporter

The transporter is a device, first seen aboard the Starship Enterprise in the Star Trek original series, which made the concept of teleportation familiar to a wide audience. "Beam me up, Scotty" became one of the small screen's most oft-repeated lines (though trivia hunters will find that "Beam me up, Mr. Scott" is the closest the show actually came to that immortal line).

In the twenty-third century world of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, shuttlecraft are used only in special circumstances when beaming someone's molecules around might prove a health hazard. But, ironically, the reason that Trek mastermind Gene Roddenberry chose to equip his starships with "transporters" had less to do with high-tech future possibilities than with low-tech Beatles-era reality. It wasn't feasible, in terms of budget or sixties-level special effects, to show convincingly a spacecraft landing on a different planet every week. Much easier to have a crewmembers shimmer out in one scene, then twinkle back an instant later someplace else. With realistic computer graphics still a couple of decades away, the effect called for plenty of ingenuity and homespun improvisation. The sparkling dematerialization and rematerialization sequences were created by dropping tiny bits of aluminum foil and aluminum perchlorate powder against a black sheet of cardboard, and photographing them illuminated from the side by a bright light. When the characters were filmed walking into the transporter, they stepped on to the pads, Kirk gave the order to energize – and the actors stepped off. In the studio lab, after the film was developed, the actors were superimposed fading out and the fluttering aluminum fading in, or vice versa. By 1994, when production started on the fourth TV incarnation of the franchise, Star Trek Voyager , computer graphics was well into its stride and a new transporter effect was devised in which little spheres of light expand to cover the person, a shower of fading glitter providing a node to the past.

The universe of Star Trek may be only make-believe. The staff at Paramount may have no more idea how to beam a person around than Leonard Nimoy has of performing a mind meld. But the Trek transporter has brought the notion of teleportation into millions of homes worldwide, and given as a common set of images and expectations. Over the course of hundreds of episodes, the transporter's technical specs have been fleshed out and its dramatic possibilities explored in more detail than almost any other device in the history of science fiction.

How Star Trek's transporters (supposedly) work

According to the official bible of Trekana, The Star Trek Encyclopedia , the transporter "briefly converts an object or person into energy, beams that energy to another location, then reassembles the subject into its original form." A little short on detail perhaps for those interested in cobbling together a version of their own to avoid the daily rush hour, but no matter: when facts are hard to come by, there's always technobabble to fill the void.

A key part of the Trek-style transporter is the so-called annular confinement beam (ACB), a cylindrical force field that channels and keeps track of the transportee from source to destination. Basically, this stops your bits and pieces from drifting off into interstellar space while you're being dispatched to the surface of some strange new world. It seems that the ACB first locks onto and then disassembles the subject into an energy- or plasma-like state, known as phased matter . This is a key step in the whole process, so it's unfortunate that the show's creators can't be a little more specific (and win a Nobel prize while they're at it). But what's clear is that some "stuff," be it matter or energy or some hybrid of these, it sent from one place to another, along with instructions needed to reconstitute the subject upon arrival. George O. Smith would have been delighted that his Special Delivery system, or something very much like it, eventually found its way into Hollywood's most celebrated starship.

Imagine, then, that you've stepped onto the transporter pad, issued the fateful command "energize," and had your atoms turned into phased matter. Now you're all set to go. Your matter stream is fed into a pattern buffer (a hyperlarge computer memory that briefly stores your entire atomic blueprint), piped to one of the beam emitters on the hull of the starship, and then relayed to a point on the ground where, all being well, the ACB will put you back together again. There's even a component of the transporter, called the Heisenberg compensator , designed to sidestep one of the most basic laws of quantum physics – Heisenberg's uncertainty principle . This frustrating little rule insists that you can never know exactly where something is and exactly how it's moving at the same time. Unnoticeable in the everyday world, it comes into effect with a vengeance at the subatomic level and, at first sight, seems to pose one of the biggest obstacles to practical teleportation. How can an exact copy of you be made somewhere else if it's impossible to establish the state of every particles in your body at the outset? No problem, according to Mike Okuda, the scenic art supervisor for the Star Trek spinoffs Deep Space Nine , Voyager , and Enterprise . His answer to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the Heisenberg compensator. (Once asked how it worked, Okuda replied, "Very well, thank you!")

Anyone wondering whether he or she would have the guts to step up to the transporter plate along with the other crewmembers and be boldly sent needs to bear two thoughts in mind. First, teleportation could probably never work along the lines just described (hint: a "Heisenberg compensator" is physically impossible). second, even in the Star Trek universe, transporters can go wrong. Well, of course they can go wrong – that's part of the fun.

Transporter malfunction!

One (or two) of William Shatner's better performances as Kirk came in Star Trek 's first-season episode, "The Enemy Within," written by the top-drawer science fiction author Richard Matheson, who also penned some of the more memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone (including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" in which Shatner sees a gremlin on the wing of a plane. Having beamed up from a mission on the planet Alpha 177, Kirk feels faint and is helped from the transporter room by Mr. Scott. A moment later a duplicate Kirk appears on the pad. Apparently the magnetic effects of an ore on the planet's surface interfered with the transporter and caused it to split the captain into two selves: one good but incapable of making decisions, the other evil and strong-willed. In this interesting twist on the Jekyll and Hyde theme, it becomes clear that the two halves can't survive apart and that the violent, animal-like component is just as essential in making Kirk an effective leader as his benign side.

Transporter fission turns to fusion in the Voyager episode "Tuvix," when crewmates Tuvok, the Vulcan security officer, and Neelix, the spotty Talaxian, longtime antagonists, are merged during a teleportation into one person. The resulting Tuvix harbors the memories of both progenitors but has a single consciousness. Initially confused and ambivalent, Tuvix eventually carves out a clear identity and personality of his own, and when a means is discovered to undo the mix-up caused by the transporter accident, he objects, not unreasonably, on the grounds that it will kill him. Captain Janeway is faced with the moral dilemma of either ending the brief existence of a distinct, unique individual who has become well-liked among the crew, or denying the rights of Tuvok and Neelix to resume their separate lives. Ensemble casting and contractual arrangements being what they are, Tuvix is consigned to oblivion.

In Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Second Chances," an identical copy of commander Wil Riker is created. Years ago, while a then-lieutenant Riker was beaming up from a planet's surface through severe atmospheric interference, the transporter chief locked on to Riker's signal with a second tracking beam. When this second beam turned out not to be needed, it was abandoned – but not lost. Unbeknownst to everyone on the ship, the ionic disturbance in the atmosphere caused the second beam to be reflected back to the planet and result in the creation of a second Riker. Fast forward eight years and the two Rikers meet. Confusion reigns, Riker-2 gets together with Riker-1's old girlfriend before matters are resolved, and Riker-2 departs to pursue his separate existence.

All good fun, of course – and useful grist for the philosophical mill. But in 1993, as Star Trek began its third incarnation, Deep Space Nine , something happened in the real universe to make beaming up seem just a little less fantastic: plans were published for building the first practical teleporter.

Transporters in the real world

Today, far from being a science fiction dream, teleportation happens routinely in laboratories all around the world. It isn't as dramatic as its Star Trek counterpart – yet. No one has had his or her atoms pulled apart in Seattle and been reconstituted moments later in Seville. The researchers doing this sort of thing aren't mad scientists intent on beaming the molecules of unfortunate animals around the lab and hoping for the best. Instead, real teleporteers belong to a group of computer specialists and physicists who share a common interest. all are involved, in one form or another, with tackling the same questions: How can information be handled at the smallest level of nature? How can messages and data be sent using individual subatomic particles?

Teleportation in the real world means quantum teleportation . Working at the quantum level, it turns out, is the only way to make an exactly perfect copy of the original. So, to understand how teleportation works means taking a trip into the weird world of quantum mechanics . It means looking at how light and matter behave at an ultra-small scale, where extraordinary things are commonplace, and common sense goes out the window.

Actual teleportation, as it's done at present, doesn't involve a flow of matter or energy. It doesn't work by streaming atoms, or any other kind of physical "stuff," from one place to another like the Enterprise's transporter. The basis of true teleportation is transferring information without sending it through ordinary space. It's a transfer achieved with the help of the strangest, most mysterious phenomenon in all of science: entanglement . A bizarre shifting of physical characteristics between nature's tiniest particles, no far apart they are, entanglement lies at the heart of teleportation as well as two other major new fields of research: quantum cryptography and quantum computation.

For now, the most we can teleport is light beams, subatomic particles, and quantum properties of atoms, rather than solid objects. But scientists are talking about teleporting molecules sometime within the next decade. Beyond that there's the prospect of doing the same with larger inanimate things. And beyond that ...

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circa 1966:  From left to right, Canadian actor William Shatner as Captain Kirk, American actor DeForest Kelley (1920 - 1999) as Dr 'Bones' McCoy and American actor Leonard Nimoy as Mr Spock in a promotional portrait for the television series, 'Star Trek'.  (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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star trek transporter

Beam me up Scotty: German scientists invent working teleporter, of sorts

New system destructively scans objects transmits them through encrypted communications across any distance and rebuilds it the other side

Teleportation has been the holy grail of transport for decades, ever since Mr Scott first beamed up Captain Kirk and his crew in the 1966 opening episode of Star Trek . Now the technology may have been cracked in real life … sort of.

Scientists from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam have invented a real-life teleporter system that can scan in an object and “beam it” to another location.

Not quite the dematerialisation and reconstruction of science fiction, the system relies on destructive scanning and 3D printing .

An object at one end of the system is milled down layer-by-layer, creating a scan per layer which is then transmitted through an encrypted communication to a 3D printer. The printer then replicates the original object layer by layer, effectively teleporting an object from one place to another.

“We present a simple self-contained appliance that allows relocating inanimate physical objects across distance,” said the six person team in a paper submitted for the Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction conference at Stanford University. “Users place an object into the sender unit, enter the address of a receiver unit, and press the relocate button.”

The system dubbed “Scotty” in homage to the Enterprise’s much beleaguered chief engineer, differs from previous systems that merely copy physical object as its layer-by-layer deconstruction and encrypted transmission ensures that only one copy of the object exists at any one time, according to the scientists.

Real-world applications are pretty short for this kind of destruction and reconstruction. But the encryption, transmission and 3D printing objects could be key for companies wishing to sell goods via home 3D printers, ensuring only one copy could be made per purchase – effectively digital rights management for 3D printed objects.

Those looking to cut their commute by simply beaming into the office will have to wait at least another decade or two.

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Why Star Trek: Enterprise Used Shuttles Instead of Transporters

Despite being its most iconic made-up technology, the transporter wasn't used in Star Trek: Enterprise that much, having used shuttles instead.

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Why star trek introduced the transporter in the original series, enterprise's use of shuttles was one way to show it was a prequel, star trek: enterprise's shuttlepods were expensive and necessary, star trek: enterprise committing to shuttles also made transporters more dramatic.

After three successful seven-year runs on television, Paramount was eager for Star Trek 's second wave to keep flowing. Against the protests of longtime producers Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, the studio insisted on another series. The two collaborated to create Star Trek: Enterprise , which moved the storytelling from the 24th Century backwards 200 years to Earth's first Warp 5 starship. While the series still had many familiar elements, Enterprise rarely used Star Trek 's iconic transporters in favor of sleek shuttles to get the characters from place-to-place.

Multiple featurettes on the complete series Blu-ray release of Star Trek: Enterprise detail how the show came to be. In a conversation between Berman and Braga, the series co-creators discuss the opposition they faced in trying to evolve Star Trek beyond what they'd been doing for the previous dozen years. Still, despite the pushback they received, Enterprise's pilot episode is still the franchise's best . The technological advancements in visual effects and the experience of artists at every level of production over the past decade has helped them tell a perfect story. Even though Captain Archer uses the transporter for the first time by the episode's end, the series still committed to using the "shuttlepod" as a primary means of transport for the crew.

Which Star Trek Series Had the Best Mirror Universe Episodes?

Of all of Star Trek's iconic technology, the transporter is perhaps the best known, even by those who aren't fans. "Beam me up, Scotty," became a national catchphrase despite never actually being said on the series. However, transporters exist simply because the production needed to save money and move the story along. "I would blow the whole budget…just in landing the [ship] on a planet," series creator Gene Roddenberry said in The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. "[T]he transporter idea was conceived, so we could get our people down to the planet fast…and get our story going by page two."

However, by the Rick Berman era of Star Trek , the transporter was less a convenience and more a storytelling problem to be overcome. When the crew of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation found themselves in trouble planet-side, the writers needed to figure out a way to disable the transporters. Otherwise, the crew on the ship could beam the characters to safety, obliterating the tension and stakes. The technology was still useful, however. In both The Original Series and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , the transporter was the primary way to get to the Mirror Universe. Similarly, Star Trek: Voyager used it, along with a unique alien flower, in the Season 2 episode "Tuvix," which presented the show's biggest moral dilemma .

William Shatner Almost Radically Changed Enterprise's Final Season

In the Blu-ray special features, Braga and Berman noted the introduction of phasers and the transporter in the pilot undercut their goal. Rather than build up to the introduction and first uses of this technology, it happened immediately. The climax of the pilot episode shows Chief Engineer Trip Tucker using the transporter to beam Captain Archer back to the ship and out of danger. The slow introduction of these familiar elements was supposed to be part of the fun of the prequel. "Once that's done, it's done," Berman said. The same "gag" (a term for a visual effects sequence) was used in the Season 3 finale in a similar way.

However, just because it happened a handful of times didn't mean the fear of the transporter was gone from the crew. "We never really used the transporter," Braga said, "we always took these shuttlepods which we spent a lot of money on." Other than an episode in which the developer of the transporter visits the ship in Season 4, the primary mode of transport was the shuttle. One of the standout episodes of Enterprise Season 1 was "Shuttlepod One" in which Tucker and security officer Malcolm Reed believe the ship was destroyed. The two are trapped in the vehicle with nowhere to go and deliver a brilliant two-hander episode.

Other technology, such as the "phase pistol" and the universal translator became as ubiquitous as they were in every other iteration of Star Trek . Phaser fights and being able to understand aliens who don't speak English are, like the transporter originally, simply better for storytelling. Thus, other than the lack of the United Federation of Planets , the crew's use of shuttles instead of beaming was the clearest reminder to the audience this show was set before Captain Kirk or, even, Captain Pike took to the stars on their continuing missions.

Why Star Trek: Enterprise's Most Controversial Torture Scene Was Necessary

One way Enterprise was unique from earlier Star Trek series was the absence of physical models for the ships. The NX-01 Enterprise was a completely digital model from a design by Doug Drexler . Inside the vessel, however, there were physical buttons, cramped spaces and other elements that blended the modern aesthetic of sci-fi television while still looking "older" than the 24th Century LCARS touchscreens. The shuttlepods were digital models for the exterior shots with a practical set for the interior, just like previous shows.

They were, ironically, sleeker and less boxy than those seen in Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation . However, they lacked the small warp nacelles and could only be used for shorter trips. The ship-to-ship battles and exploration of new planets weren't much different in Enterprise . Making the shuttlepods the crew's primary mode of transport from the NX-01 to planets, asteroids or wherever else added a unique dynamic. It also allowed the away teams to be in good dramatic trouble without needing an ion storm or other sci-fi reason the transporters couldn't do the job.

Still, as Roddenberry knew back in the 1960s, the vehicles took valuable time from the story and money from the budget. The shuttles had to be animated for each use. The show needed a permanent shuttle set, to show the actors as they travel. A full-size shuttlepod set piece and prop was built to show the actors getting in and out of them, as well. So, if the shuttlepods were as expensive as Braga suggested, they were worth every penny.

Star Trek Theory: Picard Retconned the Divisive Enterprise Series Finale

As mentioned, the first time a Starfleet officer traveled by transporter happened in the Enterprise pilot, "Broken Bow." Captain Archer is rescued at the last minute. In the Season 3 finale, the away team sent to an alien weapon-ship to destroy Earth is rescued the same way. However, Archer doesn't make it in time, subverting the audience's expectation. Ironically, he is transported by a time-traveling Starfleet officer, to set up the cliffhanger ending that forced Paramount to renew Enterprise for Season 4 .

In Season 2's "Vanishing Point," Tucker and communications officer Hoshi Sato are stranded on a planet and must be beamed back to the NX-01 Enterprise . The episode highlights Sato's fear of the transporter, and when she returns to the ship her birthmark had moved. She then starts to lose corporeality, meaning the crew can no longer see or hear her. The episode goes on like this until the very end, when it's revealed the whole story was a hallucination she experienced while in the transporter's "pattern buffer" for all of eight seconds. It's a story that could only work on Enterprise .

Because the crew so often relied on shuttles instead of a transporter, it helped one of Star Trek 's oldest inventions feel fresh. Instead of worrying about ways to overcome the ease of beaming out of trouble, it simply wasn't an option save for the most dire circumstances. While Berman feared they'd blown the novelty of the technology in the pilot, the storytellers pulled it off. When the crew did use the transporter instead of the shuttlepods, it came as a pleasant surprise rather than seeming like the obvious choice.

Star Trek: Enterprise is available to own on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital and streams on Paramount+ .

Star Trek: Enterprise

A century before Captain Kirk's five-year mission, Jonathan Archer captains the United Earth ship Enterprise during the early years of Starfleet, leading up to the Earth-Romulan War and the formation of the Federation.

Memory Alpha

Sub-quantum transporter

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Subquantum teleportation

Erickson's probe undergoes sub-quantum transport

The sub-quantum transporter was a flawed technology invented by Emory Erickson and studied by the Vulcan Science Academy . It was intended to be the replacement for the transporter used in the mid- 22nd century . The sub-quantum transporter would beam an object or person from planet-to-planet, or any other distance, since the device had unlimited range. The system also required much less power to operate.

Erickson confessed in 2154 that even during the initial testing in 2139 , he knew the sub-quantum transporter was a fundamentally flawed concept to begin with and would never deliver what it promised. Several men and women who had volunteered to test it were lost. Among these volunteers was his own son, Quinn . Erickson himself was left wheelchair bound.

In 2154, Erickson claimed he had made a breakthrough in his research. Starfleet approved new testing of the technology and Enterprise NX-01 was used to carry out the experiment. The sub-quantum transporter successfully beamed a probe 40,000 kilometers away, a distance never before achieved using traditional transporter technology. There was however no actual breakthrough. Erickson was only using the test as a ruse to gain access to the Enterprise 's powerful transporter system in order to attempt a rescue of Quinn's transporter pattern, lost fifteen years earlier in the subspace node of The Barrens . ( ENT : " Daedalus ")

See also [ ]

  • Spatial trajector
  • Subspace transporter
  • Transwarp beaming
  • 2 USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-G)
  • 3 Star Trek: The Next Generation

transporter beam star trek enterprise

Star Trek: The Next Generations 'Cause and Effect' Explained

T he Star Trek franchise has a straightforward mandate when it comes to making individual episodes. The writers select a science fiction idea with varying levels of grounded realism. Each concept walks a line between needless complexity and fanciful silliness. The writers and directors generally accomplish that feat, delivering fun episodes of TV that leave audiences thinking without making them laugh inappropriately. "Cause and Effect" is a stellar example of a now well-worn trope that blew fans' minds in the 90s.

The time loop or temporal loop is a literary plot device that originated over 100 years ago. Russian novelist P. D. Ouspensky used the concept in his 1915 book, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, to discuss the mechanical nature of human thought. Richard A. Lupoff's 1973 short story "12:01 P.M." cemented the concept and its most common format. The most popular example remains Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day . The concept appears throughout pop culture today, sometimes including groundbreaking innovations like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's "Through the Flash." "Cause and Effect" is Star Trek 's first foray into the concept.

Star Trek: Who is Isabella?

What is "cause and effect" about.

"Cause and Effect" opens with a gripping teaser in which the Enterprise-D suffers a cataclysmic collision, spins out of control, and explodes, killing everyone aboard. The episode resumes unabated, depicting a tense poker game between the Enterprise-D crew members. Beverly Crusher calls Riker's bluff, winning the hand with unusual prescience. As she treats Geordi La Forge for his unexplained vertigo symptoms, Crusher experiences déjà vu. Worf discovers a localized fluctuation in the space-time continuum, through which a Federation ship suddenly emerges. The vessel rockets inexorably toward the Enterprise-D. Picard requests suggestions from the senior staff. Riker recommends igniting an explosive decompression reaction to push the Enterprise to the side. Data pitches using a tractor beam to shove the oncoming vessel away. Picard follows Data's advice , but the ships collide and explode, just as they did in the teaser.

The Enterprise-D crew experiences the time loop again. They play cards, but Riker experiences déjà vu and folds before Crusher can call his bluff. Details shift through each subsequent loop. Now La Forge feels the familiarity Crusher expressed. Crusher and other crew members hear whispers in the night. Déjà vu spreads throughout the crew. The Enterprise hits the mystery ship and explodes again. Crusher records the mysterious voices on her third trip through the loop. La Forge discovers the temporal loop , prompting Data to examine the recordings and pick out thousands of copies of Picard, Worf, and Data's voices. With the knowledge of what will happen next, it's up to the senior staff to find a way out before they're doomed to endless violent deaths.

Why is "Cause and Effect" significant?

"Cause and Effect" earned excellent ratings when it premiered. It also prompted hundreds of calls to local affiliate stations from confused viewers. The TNG season 5 Blu-ray special features mention widespread complaints from fans. According to writer Brannon Braga , audiences of the early 90s were less understanding of non-conventional story structures. Those calling in believed that the episode footage was repeating unintentionally between commercial breaks. This likely primed Star Trek fans for unusual future episodes. Braga also stated that "Cause and Effect" was his most popular episode. The outing appears to this day on various top ten lists and compilations.

How does "Cause and Effect" end?

Data discovers a way to create a resonance in his positronic brain, essentially leaving a message for himself on the next loop. As the day starts anew, Data gradually notices the number three appearing in various places. Data deals only threes in the poker game, followed by several players simultaneously drawing three of a kind. The statistical anomaly draws attention. Data runs diagnostics, receiving a string of threes. He reports his findings, prompting a discussion about the number's potential meaning. As the ship emerges again, Data realizes that the three represents the command pips on Riker's uniform. Data withdraws his tractor beam idea and supports Riker's proposition , which allows the Enterprise to evade the oncoming vessel. The time loop ends, revealing that the crew spent 17 days in the fluctuation. They welcome the crew of the USS Bozeman , who has been trapped for more than 90 years.

"Cause and Effect" is a compelling episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation . It enjoyed the benefit of a trope only one year before Bill Murray would make it iconic. Though contemporary audiences struggled to understand the unique premise, modern viewers love the episode. It's funny that Jonathan Frakes would direct an episode in which the solution to an otherwise unsolvable problem is to listen to his character. "Cause and Effect" is worth a rewatch, for anyone looking to relive the past a few times.

Star Trek: Why Was The Original Series Canceled?

Star Trek: The Next Generations 'Cause and Effect' Explained

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The Future of ‘Star Trek’: From ‘Starfleet Academy’ to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise Is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans

Star Trek

Anson Mount is sitting across from me on one of the Toronto soundstages for the Paramount+ series “ Star Trek : Strange New Worlds,” which is set in the years when his character, Capt. Christopher Pike, led the legendary Federation starship with a young Spock and Uhura. We’re speaking on the sleek Enterprise bridge, and Mount is recounting the out-of-body experience he had the first time he sat in the iconic captain’s chair. “I had this immediate flashback to playing ‘Star Trek’ as a kid,” he says. “I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t at some point stop and think to myself, ‘I’m on fucking “Star Trek.”’”

transporter beam star trek enterprise

Neil Jamieson for Variety

“Strange New Worlds” is the 12th “Star Trek” TV show since the original series debuted on NBC in 1966, introducing Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a hopeful future for humanity. In the 58 years since, the “Star Trek” galaxy has logged 900 television episodes and 13 feature films, amounting to 668 hours — nearly 28 days — of content to date. Even compared with “Star Wars” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Star Trek” stands as the only storytelling venture to deliver a single narrative experience for this long across TV and film.

In other words, “Star Trek” is not just a franchise. As Alex Kurtzman , who oversees all “Star Trek” TV production, puts it, “‘Star Trek’ is an institution.”

Without a steady infusion of new blood, though, institutions have a way of fading into oblivion (see soap operas, MySpace, Blockbuster Video). To keep “Star Trek” thriving has meant charting a precarious course to satisfy the fans who have fueled it for decades while also discovering innovative ways to get new audiences on board.

“Doing ‘Star Trek’ means that you have to deliver something that’s entirely familiar and entirely fresh at the same time,” Kurtzman says.

Fulfilling that mandate has never been more vital to Paramount Global, which needs the franchise to flourish while the company competes in a troubled streaming economy and burnishes its value for potential buyers. “We take it very seriously,” says David Stapf, president of CBS Studios. “‘Star Trek’ is one of the most valued, treasured and to-be-nurtured franchises in all of media.”

The franchise has certainly weathered its share of fallow periods, most recently after “Nemesis” bombed in theaters in 2002 and UPN canceled “Enterprise” in 2005. It took 12 years for “Star Trek” to return to television with the premiere of “Discovery” in 2017; since then, however, there has been more “Star Trek” on TV than ever: The adventure series “Strange New Worlds,” the animated comedy “Lower Decks” and the kids series “Prodigy” are all in various stages of production, and the serialized thriller “Picard” concluded last year, when it ranked, along with “Strange New Worlds,” among Nielsen’s 10 most-watched streaming original series for multiple weeks. Nearly one in five Paramount+ subscribers in the U.S. is watching at least one “Star Trek” series, according to the company, and more than 50% of fans watching one of the new “Trek” shows also watch at least two others. The new shows air in 200 international markets and are dubbed into 35 languages. As “Discovery” launches its fifth and final season in April, “Star Trek” is in many ways stronger than it’s ever been.

“’Star Trek’s fans have kept it alive more times than seems possible,” says Eugene Roddenberry, Jr., who executive produces the TV series through Roddenberry Entertainment. “While many shows rightfully thank their fans for supporting them, we literally wouldn’t be here without them.”

But the depth of fan devotion to “Star Trek” also belies a curious paradox about its enduring success: “It’s not the largest fan base,” says Akiva Goldsman, “Strange New Worlds” executive producer and co-showrunner. “It’s not ‘Star Wars.’ It’s certainly not Marvel.”

When J.J. Abrams rebooted “Star Trek” in 2009 — with Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Zoe Saldaña playing Kirk, Spock and Uhura — the movie grossed more than any previous “Star Trek” film by a comfortable margin. But neither that film nor its two sequels broke $500 million in global grosses, a hurdle every other top-tier franchise can clear without breaking a sweat.

There’s also the fact that “Star Trek” fans are aging. I ask “The Next Generation” star Jonathan Frakes, who’s acted in or directed more versions of “Star Trek” than any other person alive, how often he meets fans for whom the new “Star Trek” shows are their first. “Of the fans who come to talk to me, I would say very, very few,” he says. “‘Star Trek’ fans, as we know, are very, very, very loyal — and not very young.”

As Stapf puts it: “There’s a tried and true ‘Trek’ fan that is probably going to come to every ‘Star Trek,’ no matter what it is — and we want to expand the universe.”

transporter beam star trek enterprise

While Paramount Pictures redoubles its efforts to get a “Star Trek” feature into theaters, Kurtzman and his production company Secret Hideout are pushing the boundaries of what “Star Trek” can look like on the small screen. Michelle Yeoh just wrapped filming the first “Star Trek” TV movie, “Section 31,” a spy thriller that the Oscar winner characterizes as “‘Mission: Impossible’ in space.” And this summer, the first “Star Trek” YA series, “Starfleet Academy,” will start production on the largest single set ever created for “Star Trek” on TV.

Every single person I spoke to for this story talked about “Star Trek” with a joyful earnestness as rare in the industry as (nerd alert) a Klingon pacifist.

“When I’m meeting fans, sometimes they’re coming to be confirmed, like I’m kind of a priest,” Ethan Peck says during a break in filming on the “Strange New Worlds” set. He’s in full Spock regalia — pointy ears, severe eyebrows, bowl haircut — and when asked about his earliest memories of “Star Trek,” he stares off into space in what looks like Vulcan contemplation. “I remember being on the playground in second or third grade and doing the Vulcan salute, not really knowing where it came from,” he says. “When I thought of ‘Star Trek,’ I thought of Spock. And now I’m him. It’s crazy.”

To love “Star Trek” is to love abstruse science and cowboy diplomacy, complex moral dilemmas and questions about the meaning of existence. “It’s ultimately a show with the most amazing vision of optimism, I think, ever put on-screen in science fiction,” says Kurtzman, who is 50. “All you need is two minutes on the news to feel hopeless now. ‘Star Trek’ is honestly the best balm you could ever hope for.”

I’m getting a tour of the USS Enterprise from Scotty — or, rather, “Strange New World” production designer Jonathan Lee, who is gushing in his native Scottish burr as we step into the starship’s transporter room. “I got such a buzzer from doing this, I can’t tell you,” he says. “I actually designed four versions of it.”

Lee is especially proud of the walkway he created to run behind the transporter pads — an innovation that allows the production to shoot the characters from a brand-new set of angles as they beam up from a far-flung planet. It’s one of the countless ways that this show has been engineered to be as cinematic as possible, part of Kurtzman’s overall vision to make “Star Trek” on TV feel like “a movie every week.”

Kurtzman’s tenure with “Star Trek” began with co-writing the screenplay for Abrams’ 2009 movie, which was suffused with a fast-paced visual style that was new to the franchise. When CBS Studios approached Kurtzman in the mid-2010s about bringing “Star Trek” back to TV, he knew instinctively that it needed to be just as exciting as that film.

“The scope was so much different than anything we had ever done on ‘Next Gen,’” says Frakes, who’s helmed two feature films with the “Next Generation” cast and directed episodes of almost every live-action “Trek” TV series, including “Discovery” and “Strange New Worlds.” “Every department has the resources to create.”

A new science lab set for Season 3, for example, boasts a transparent floor atop a four-foot pool of water that swirls underneath the central workbench, and the surrounding walls sport a half dozen viewscreens with live schematics custom designed by a six-person team. “I like being able to paint on a really big canvas,” Kurtzman says. “The biggest challenge is always making sure that no matter how big something gets, you’re never losing focus on that tiny little emotional story.”

transporter beam star trek enterprise

Marni Grossman

To strike that balance, “Strange New Worlds” showrunners Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers have rooted the series in a classic episodic structure while constantly experimenting with the fluidity of what “Star Trek” can be. In its first two seasons, “Strange New Worlds” hopped from monster horror to body-swap comedy to costume fantasy to courtroom drama to a full-blown musical featuring a Klingon boy band. For Season 3, debuting in 2025, Frakes directed an episode framed as a Hollywood murder mystery that he calls “the best episode of television I’ve ever done.”

At this point, is there a genre that “Strange New Worlds” can’t do? “As long as we’re in storytelling that is cogent and sure handed, I’m not sure there is,” Goldsman says with an impish smile. “Could it do Muppets? Sure. Could it do black and white, silent, slapstick? Maybe!”

This approach is also meant to appeal to people who might want to watch “Star Trek” but regard those 668 hours of backstory as an insurmountable burden. “You shouldn’t have to watch a ‘previously on’ to follow our show,” Myers says.

To achieve so many hairpin shifts in tone and setting while maintaining Kurtzman’s cinematic mandate, “Strange New Worlds” has embraced one of the newest innovations in visual effects: virtual production. First popularized on the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” the technology — called the AR wall — involves a towering circular partition of LED screens projecting a highly detailed, computer-generated backdrop. Rather than act against a greenscreen, the actors can see whatever fantastical surroundings their characters are inhabiting, lending a richer level of verisimilitude to the show.

But there is a catch. While the technology is calibrated to maintain a proper sense of three-dimensional perspective through the camera lens, it can be a bit dizzying for anyone standing on the set. “The images on the walls start to move in a way that makes no sense,” says Mount. “You end up having to focus on something that’s right in front of you so you don’t fall down.”

And yet, even as he’s talking about it, Mount can’t help but break into a boyish grin. “Sometimes we call it the holodeck,” he says. In fact, the pathway to the AR wall on the set is dotted with posters of the virtual reality room from “The Next Generation” and the words “Enter Holodeck” in a classic “Trek” font.

“I want to take one of those home with me,” Peck says. Does the AR wall also affect him? “I don’t really get disoriented by it. Spock would not get ill, so I’m Method acting.”

I’m on the set of the “Star Trek” TV movie “Section 31,” seated in an opulent nightclub with a view of a brilliant, swirling nebula, watching Yeoh rehearse with director Olatunde Osunsanmi and her castmates. Originally, the project was announced as a TV series centered on Philippa Georgiou, the semi-reformed tyrant Yeoh originated on “Discovery.” But between COVID delays and the phenomenon of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” there wasn’t room in the veteran actress’s schedule to fit a season of television. Yeoh was undaunted.

“We’d never let go of her,” she says of her character. “I was just blown away by all the different things I could do with her. Honestly, it was like, ‘Let’s just get it done, because I believe in this.’”

A few minutes later, dozens of extras in all manner of outlandish eveningwear file into the club, several of them made up as classic “Star Trek” aliens that fans might be surprised to see in this kind of swanky establishment. But I’m far more distracted by a different discovery: Georgiou is standing with a young Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), a character first introduced on “Next Generation” as the older fearless captain of the USS Enterprise-C.

If that means nothing to you, don’t worry: The enormity of the revelation that Garrett is being brought back is meant only for fans. If you don’t know who the character is, you’re not missing anything.

“It was always my goal to deliver an entertaining experience that is true to the universe but appeals to newcomers,” says screenwriter Craig Sweeny. “I wanted a low barrier of entry so that anybody could enjoy it.”

Nevertheless, including Garrett on the show is exactly the kind of gasp-worthy detail meant to flood “Star Trek” fans with geeky good feeling.

“You cannot create new fans to the exclusion of old fans,” Kurtzman says. “You must serve your primary fan base first and you must keep them happy. That is one of the most important steps to building new fans.”

transporter beam star trek enterprise

Michelle Yeoh stars in “Section 31.” Jan Thijs/Paramount+

On its face, that maxim would make “Section 31” a genuine risk. The titular black-ops organization has been controversial with “Star Trek” fans since it was introduced in the 1990s. “The concept is almost antagonistic to some of the values of ‘Star Trek,’” Sweeny says. But he still saw “Section 31” as an opportunity to broaden what a “Star Trek” project could be while embracing the radical inclusivity at the heart of the franchise’s appeal.

“Famously, there’s a spot for everybody in Roddenberry’s utopia, so I was like, ‘Well, who would be the people who don’t quite fit in?’” he says. “I didn’t want to make the John le Carré version, where you’re in the headquarters and it’s backbiting and shades of gray. I wanted to do the people who were at the edges, out in the field. These are not people who necessarily work together the way you would see on a ‘Star Trek’ bridge.”

For Osunsanmi, who grew up watching “The Next Generation” with his father, it boils down to a simple question: “Is it putting good into the world?” he asks. “Are these characters ultimately putting good into the world? And, taking a step back, are we putting good into the world? Are we inspiring humans watching this to be good? That’s for me what I’ve always admired about ‘Star Trek.’”

Should “Section 31” prove successful, Yeoh says she’s game for a sequel. And Kurtzman is already eyeing more opportunities for TV movies, including a possible follow-up to “Picard.” The franchise’s gung-ho sojourn into streaming movies, however, stands in awkward contrast to the persistent difficulty Paramount Pictures and Abrams’ production company Bad Robot have had making a feature film following 2016’s “Star Trek Beyond” — the longest theaters have gone without a “Star Trek” movie since Paramount started making them.

First, a movie reuniting Pine’s Capt. Kirk with his late father — played in the 2009 “Star Trek” by Chris Hemsworth — fell apart in 2018. Around the same time, Quentin Tarantino publicly flirted with, then walked away from, directing a “Star Trek” movie with a 1930s gangster backdrop. Noah Hawley was well into preproduction on a “Star Trek” movie with a brand-new cast, until then-studio chief Emma Watts abruptly shelved it in 2020. And four months after Abrams announced at Paramount’s 2022 shareholders meeting that his 2009 cast would return for a movie directed by Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”), Shakman left the project to make “The Fantastic Four” for Marvel. (It probably didn’t help that none of the cast had been approached before Abrams made his announcement.)

The studio still intends to make what it’s dubbed the “final chapter” for the Pine-Quinto-Saldaña cast, and Steve Yockey (“The Flight Attendant”) is writing a new draft of the script. Even further along is another prospective “Star Trek” film written by Seth Grahame-Smith (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”) and to be directed by Toby Haynes (“Andor,” “Black Mirror: USS Callister”) that studio insiders say is on track to start preproduction by the end of the year. That project will serve as an origin story of sorts for the main timeline of the entire franchise. In both cases, the studio is said to be focused on rightsizing the budgets to fit within the clear box office ceiling for “Star Trek” feature films.

transporter beam star trek enterprise

Dan Doperalski for Variety

That tension isn’t exclusive to the film studio. I lost count of the number of times someone made a point to note, with real pride, how one or the other of the “Star Trek” TV productions is saving money, whether it be “Section 31” repurposing sets from “Discovery” or “Strange New Worlds” redressing the same set to be everything from crew quarters to a sparring gym. No one will get specific about budgets, but Kurtzman says that “Section 31” costs “so much less than you’d ever make a ‘Star Trek’ movie for.”

Far from complaining, everyone seems to relish the challenge. Visual effects supervisor Jason Zimmerman says that “working with Alex, the references are always at least $100 million movies, if not more, so we just kind of reverse engineer how do we do that without having to spend the same amount of money and time.”

The workload doesn’t seem to faze him either. “Visual effects people are a big, big ‘Star Trek’ fandom,” he says. “You naturally just get all these people who go a little bit above and beyond, and you can’t trade that for anything.”

In one of Kurtzman’s several production offices in Toronto, he and production designer Matthew Davies are scrutinizing a series of concept drawings for the newest “Star Trek” show, “Starfleet Academy.” A bit earlier, they showed me their plans for the series’ central academic atrium, a sprawling, two-story structure that will include a mess hall, amphitheater, trees, catwalks, multiple classrooms and a striking view of the Golden Gate Bridge in a single, contiguous space. To fit it all, they plan to use every inch of Pinewood Toronto’s 45,900 square foot soundstage, the largest in Canada.

But this is a “Star Trek” show, so there do need to be starships, and Kurtzman is discussing with Davies about how one of them should look. The issue is that “Starfleet Academy” is set in the 32nd century, an era so far into the future Kurtzman and his team need to invent much of its design language.

“For me, this design is almost too Klingon,” Kurtzman says. “I want to see the outline and instinctively, on a blink, recognize it as a Federation ship.”

The time period was first introduced on Season 3 of “Discovery,” when the lead character, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), transported the namesake starship and its crew there from the 23rd century. “It was exciting, because every time we would make a decision, we would say, ‘And now that’s canon,’” says Martin-Green.

If Roddenberry’s conception of an egalitarian future is the foundation for “Star Trek,” then canon is its lumber, creating its expansive and elaborate narrative framework of alien species, theoretical technology and para-historical incident. As the word implies, for some fans, canon is no less than holy writ. Any perceived deviation or disruption — like deciding Burnham is Spock’s heretofore unmentioned adopted sister — is akin to blasphemy, and “Trek” fans have never been shy about expressing their displeasure.

transporter beam star trek enterprise

“We listened to a lot of it,” Kurtzman says. “I think I’ve been able to separate the toxic fandom from really true fans who love ‘Star Trek’ and want you to hear what they have to say about what they would like to see.”

By Season 2, the “Discovery” writers pivoted from its dour, war-torn first season and sent the show on its trajectory 900-plus years into the future. “We had to be very aware of making sure that Spock was in the right place and that Burnham’s existence was explained properly, because she was never mentioned in the original series,” says executive producer and showrunner Michelle Paradise. “What was fun about jumping into the future is that it was very much fresh snow.”

That freedom affords “Starfleet Academy” far more creative latitude while also dramatically reducing how much the show’s target audience of tweens and teens needs to know about “Star Trek” before watching — which puts them on the same footing as the students depicted in the show. “These are kids who’ve never had a red alert before,” Noga Landau, executive producer and co-showrunner, says. “They never had to operate a transporter or be in a phaser fight.”

In the “Starfleet Academy” writers’ room in Secret Hideout’s Santa Monica offices, Kurtzman tells the staff — a mix of “Star Trek” die-hards, part-time fans and total newbies — that he wants to take a 30,000-foot view for a moment. “I think we need to ground in science more throughout the show,” he says, a giant framed photograph of Spock ears just over his shoulder. “The kids need to use science more to solve problems.”

Immediately, one of the writers brightens. “Are you saying we can amp up the techno-babble?” she says. “I’m just excited I get to use my computer science degree.”

After they break for lunch, Kurtzman is asked how much longer he plans to keep making “Star Trek.”

“The minute I fall out of love with it is the minute that it’s not for me anymore. I’m not there yet,” he says. “To be able to build in this universe to tell stories that are fundamentally about optimism and a better future at a time when the world seems to be falling apart — it’s a really powerful place to live every day.”

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The Business of Entertainment

The ‘Star Trek’ Episode That Was Banned Overseas for Nearly 30 Years

The ban would get overturned in 1995.

The Big Picture

  • Star Trek: The Original Series took on racial controversies, including racism and prejudice, throughout its episodes.
  • The "Patterns of Force" episode was banned in Germany due to the Nazi symbols and pro-fascist sentiments depicted.
  • German censorship laws post-World War II led to a ban on the episode due to showcasing Nazi ideology, though it was eventually reinstated.

Star Trek: The Original Series was a groundbreaking show that has since inspired an entire universe of stories and unforgettable characters. It challenged viewers by positing an idealistic future over a dystopian one. By juxtaposing this future against a more primal human history, it showcases the best of what humanity offers. The show was no stranger to racially driven controversy, airing America's first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk ( William Shatner ) and Lt. Nyota Uhura ( Nichelle Nichols ) and exploring the horrors of racism and prejudice in the ever popular half-black-half-white alien race episode. This is why it is so surprising that the 21st episode of its 2nd season, "Patterns of Force," was banned on German television between 1968 and 1995 due to the depiction of Nazi uniforms and the presence of several different Nazi symbols.

Star Trek: The Original Series

*Availability in US

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In the 23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets.

What Happens In "Patterns of Force"?

The episode sees the crew of the Starship Enterprise investigating the disappearance of a Federation cultural observer, John Gill, on the fascist-like planet of Ekos, overrun with Nazi-like soldiers dressed in SS-type uniforms and bolstered by brown-shirted stormtroopers hell-bent on preserving the soul-crushing status quo. Ekos is at war with Zeon, a peaceful planet that starkly contrasts with the warlike society of Ekos. John Gill, Kirk's history professor at Star Fleet Academy, decides to take the mission. As they orbit the planet, they are suddenly attacked with a thermonuclear weapon, a disturbing "what if the Nazis had the bomb." The technology, Kirk surmises, is far too advanced for Ekos, and the Captain believes that Gill may be responsible for violating the Prime Directive and introducing advanced technology to a fledgling civilization. Kirk, First Science Officer Spock ( Leonard Nimoy ), and Chief Medical Officer Hank McCoy ( DeForest Kelley ) beam to the planet to investigate.

Upon arrival, the landing party soon discovers that Ekos is in the thick of a Nazi-like purge of Zeons, dressed in Nazi regalia and sporting swastika flags. The crew is horrified as a Zeon citizen is dragged off by the Ekos officers. As they continue to explore the planet and acclimate themselves to the hostile environment, Kirk and company come upon an outdoor news-reel-type film portraying a Nazi rally where citizens chant Nazi slogans, wave swastika flags, sport iron crosses and even make mention of a "Final Solution" promising genocide against the Zeon people and their destruction in the occupied city. Some clips from this reel, most notably the ones where Adolph Hitler is driving in his car, were taken from the authentic Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will .

Eventually, the crew finds Gill, drugged up and taken prisoner by the regime, where they learn that Gill had intentionally imposed a type of Nazi-style fascism on the then anarchic and wild citizens of Ekos. Gill posits that the Nazi regime on Earth was "the most efficient society" humanity has created and that it was necessary to bring law and order to the planet, and this did not sit well with German broadcasters at all .

If Every Western Was Put Into a Blender, It Would Make This 'Star Trek: TNG' Episode

Why did germany ban 'star trek's "patterns of force" episode.

German networks decided that the episode was unfit to air and banned it until 1995 , when it would be broadcast in the original English with subtitles on German paid programming. The episode was publicly broadcast on November 4, 2011, on channel ZDFneo. But why did it take so long to get on the air? Why did German censors ban the episode? A disturbing story though it is, the episode culminates with a total condemnation of fascism and, precisely, the Nazi regime. With a peaceful resolution between the two planets, viewers wonder how such a ban could happen and why it has lasted so long. Why is it that you can see swastikas in America but not in Germany ? The answer has everything to do with what happened in Germany post-World War II.

Germany fell on May 7, 1945 , and the Allied Forces quickly took control over the country, where they immediately banned the use of any Nazi symbols (the swastika) and literature ( Mein Kamf ) and the Nazi Party itself. In 1949, the West German government banned legal codification , putting an end to all public displays of Nazism, including but not limited to symbols and language, as well as propaganda , including the famous "Heil Hitler" one-armed salute. Germany, it would appear, had taken a hard line on hate speech. The idea was to stamp out the pernicious Nazi ideology that still existed because hardcore SS Officers and their families still lived in the country. As communism rose in the East, fascism was a tantalizing push-back against another equally authoritarian and murderous regime that was in danger of gaining ground in Germany. The tendency of people to fall into tribalistic political camps was too great, and the risk of a slide back into Nazism was possible, so the government took action.

In 1960, the German government wrote into law a framework which would “make it illegal to incite hatred, to provoke violence, or to insult, ridicule or defame ‘parts of the population’ in a manner apt to breach the peace.” Over time, the framework would extend to writing and, subsequently, screenwriting. So why was the Star Trek episode banned in Germany? It was forbidden because all the symbols, language, and ideology of the Nazi Party were shown. With Gills's pro-fascist sentiments on full display, the German networks could not take the risk of showing an episode of Star Trek that so clearly violated the laws the German parliament had seen fit to enact. So, the episode was pulled and kept from German audiences for years.

Star Trek: The Original Series is streaming on Pluto TV in the U.S.

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Published Mar 26, 2024

Star Trek's Strongest Supporting Women Characters

Beyond the Captain Janeways, Dr. Crushers, and Major Kiras, there has always been strong women in Star Trek.

Illustrated collage featuring Star Trek's Number One, Kasidy Yates, Carol Marcus, Ro Laren, Lursa, Edith Keeler, Rachel Garrett, and Lily Sloane

StarTrek.com

While the Star Trek franchise reached its pinnacle with Kate Mulgrew's fantastic portrayal of Captain Janeway, it began earlier with the truly revolutionary casting of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura. While one can nitpick and say she was subservient to the boys (and there's definitely an argument to be made), the very fact that an African American woman was seen on the Bridge had a direct impact on the viewing public. (Just ask Whoopi Goldberg!)

As Women's History Month comes to a close, let's take a look back — beyond the Dr. Crushers and Major Kiras — to some of the less-obvious strong women characters in the history of Star Trek .

10. Captain Kasidy Yates

Close-up of Kasidy Yates as she smiles over at Ben Sisko in 'The Way of the Warrior'

"The Way of the Warrior"

It takes a special kind of woman to win the heart of a space station commander, military leader, and Emissary to the Prophets. Kasidy Yates is that women.

She's a hardworking cargo ship captain (engaging in some light and mostly benign smuggling on the side) who refuses special treatment when caught or when it’s time to pitch in against the Dominion. Plus, she likes baseball. Yeah, Kasidy is awesome — let Sisko do the cooking!

9. Yeoman Leslie Thompson

Yeoman Leslie Thompson beams down to a planet's surface with the away team in 'By Any Other Name'

"By Any Other Name"

Okay, an odd pick, sure, but hear me out 'cause this is important.

How much was The Original Series in the vanguard? They were willing to have women beam down to planets as part of armed away teams. And sometimes (okay, once) they were willing to kill them off. Pretty radical!

Yeoman Thompson was the redshirt who was turned into the giant chalk Dungeons & Dragons cube and then crushed to death by that jerk from the Andromeda Galaxy in " By Any Other Name ."

8. Romulan Commander

The Romulan commander sits comfortably in her seat in 'The Enterprise Incident'

"The Enterprise Incident"

Nobody said they all had to be good guys!

While ultimately unsuccessful, the unnamed Romulan Commander from The Original Series ' "The Enterprise Incident" was cunning enough that it took the wits of both Kirk and Spock to take her down.

She had ambition and drive, as well as the courage to sacrifice herself for the good of the Romulan Empire. And did she actually get under Spock's Vulcan skin a little bit? That's up to your interpretation.

7. Lily Sloane

Close-up of Lily Sloane on the surface of Earth in Bozeman as she looks up to the sky in Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek: First Contact

Blow up the damn ship!

Lily Sloane, Star Trek: First Contact

It takes a lot of sand to say — to SHOUT — something like that to Jean-Luc Picard, as Lily Sloane does in Star Trek: First Contact . And to kinda be right? Even more so.

Most civilians from a pre-Warp era would just be freaking out that time traveling humans and aliens are bombarding Earth, but this sharp engineer keeps her head enough to offer military advice.

Close-up of Lursa as she holds a cup in 'Redemption'

"Redemption"

The true mastermind of the Klingon Civil War, the machinations of Lursa of the House of Duras left the galaxy quaking for whole seasons. Even with all this going on, she found time to be a mother. Awww, right?

Also, her death in Star Trek Generations was cooler than Kirk's. Sadly, it was WAY cooler.

(Feel free to argue with me that Kai Winn shoulda got the "political puppet master" slot. It was a close call.)

5. Captain Rachel Garrett

Captain Rachel Garrett looks up while on the bridge of the Enterprise-C in 'Yesterday's Enterprise'

"Yesterday's Enterprise"

From Star Trek: The Next Generation 's " Yesterday's Enterprise ," a serious contender for best single episode ever in any series, we meet the captain of the Enterprise -C, Rachel Garrett . And we don't even KNOW that it is due to her bravery and sacrifice that the current timeline is as breezy and upbeat as it is today. (Guinan kinda knows, but that's complicated.)

Tricia O'Neal's strong-yet-still-feminine portrayal of a starship captain no doubt paved the way toward Captain Janeway, another reason to offer her a hero's salute.

4. Dr. Carol Marcus

Carol Marcus pensively glances over in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The woman who held, at least for a time, the heart of James Tiberius Kirk. But Dr. Marcus is no mere Captain's squeeze. She is an independent woman and a brilliant scientist whose Genesis Device is so powerful it was the focus of two movies!!

She also represents one of the very few times you'll see someone have a bone of contention with Starfleet prior to the creation of the Maquis.

(Again, here's your opportunity to scream at me for leaving a different brilliant scientist, Dr. Leah Brahms , off the list. This is hard work, people! And thankless, too. I felt the heat the other day for not including the Salt Vampire from TOS or the corpses from TNG ’s “ Night Terrors ” in my column about Trek ’s freakiest moments.)

3. Number One

Number One sits at her station on the bridge of the Enterprise in 'The Cage'

"The Cage"

Captain Pike's steady-as-a-rock first officer, Number One, was a brilliant tactician who wasn't afraid to bring out the laser cannons, or to sacrifice herself with an overloaded phaser rather than suffer indignities at the hands of the Talosians.

If you think her story ended with "The Cage," oh, how wrong you are. Drop everything and read John Byrne's fantastic comic series Star Trek: Crew to see Number One's really whacked-out adventures both pre- and post- her time on the Enterprise . Then pick up some of Peter David's New Frontier novels and focus on the Morgana Prime character. (I was there at New York Comic-Con a few years ago when David basically admitted that Morgana - Robin Lefler's mother - was actually Number One!)

In addition, Number One's adventure continues aboard Pike's Enterprise on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds .

2. Ro Laren

Close-up of Ro Laren in Star Trek: The Next Generation - Preemptive Strike

"Preemptive Strike"

[ RELATED : Everything You Need to Know About Ro Laren ]

One of the richest figures in Star Trek , the Bajoran nationalist was the first character we ever met whose antipathy toward Starfleet ever seemed justified. Still, her loyalty to Captain Picard kept her in line... most of the time.

Ro Laren was such a badass that even the woman who played her, Michelle Forbes, had to swim upstream. She rejected the offer to be a lead on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , causing the show's producers to create the (at first) somewhat similar character of Kira Nerys. Ultimately, it worked out for the best, but, oh, if only we could glimpse into that alternate timeline!

But to hold that desire ever, don't miss Ro Laren's confrontation with Picard 30+ years after the fact in Star Trek: Picard .

1. Edith Keeler

Close-up of Edith Keeler with a street light shining on her at night in 'The City on the Edge of Forever'

"The City on the Edge of Forever"

Imagine a woman whose soup is so powerful it could change the course of World War II.

In " The City on the Edge of Forever ," it is this loving, warm, and caring pacifist who must be silenced for evil not to conquer the world. (Blame Harlan Ellison; he's the sicko that thought of it!) Edith Keeler isn't just a character; she's a philosophical construct, a topic worthy of intellectual debate that the finest scholars could argue about for ages. And just thinking about her (and the phrase "He knows, Doctor. He knows.") is enough to send an army of Star Trek fans blubbering.

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This article was originally published on Januarr 15, 2012.

Jordan Hoffman is a writer, critic and lapsed filmmaker living in New York City. His work can also be seen on Film.com, ScreenCrush and Badass Digest. On his BLOG, Jordan has reviewed all 727. On his BLOG, Jordan has reviewed all 727 Trek episodes and films, most of the comics and some of the novels.

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VIDEO

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COMMENTS

  1. Transporter (Star Trek)

    Design. On Star Trek: The Original Series, the transporter was portrayed as a platform on which characters stand before being engulfed by a beam of light and transported to their destination.The transporter's special effect was originally created by turning a slow-motion camera upside down and photographing some backlit shiny grains of aluminium powder that were dropped between the camera and ...

  2. Transporter

    The transporter was a type of teleportation machine, or simply teleporter. It was a subspace device capable of almost instantaneously transporting an object from one location to another, by using matter-energy conversion to transform matter into energy, then beam it to or from a chamber, where it was reconverted back or materialize into its original pattern. (TOS: "The Squire of Gothos", "The ...

  3. Has there ever been an instance in Star Trek where someone beamed into

    One of the many notable devices in Star Trek is the transporter, which can beam people to any set coordinates. ... Crewman Ethan Novakovich was beamed back from the face of a planet later known as Archer IV by the still-experimental transporter system aboard Enterprise NX-01. The emergency transport was attempted during a fierce windstorm. Upon ...

  4. Transporter accident

    Trentin Fala killed after her transporter beam was scrambled by a remat detonator. The Bajoran Trentin Fala was killed in a transporter malfunction aboard one of Deep Space 9's runabouts that was caused by a remat detonator.The detonator caused a power surge in the pattern buffer, and interfered with the integration matrix. Lieutenant Commanders Worf and Jadzia Dax, who were conducting the ...

  5. The Untold Truth About Star Trek Transporters

    According to Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton), "transporting really is the safest way to travel" in the "Star Trek" universe. Having your atoms disassembled by a computer, beamed to another location ...

  6. Is beaming down in Star Trek a death sentence?

    Establishing a lock. Trek has always depicted characters who are hesitant to use the transporter, from Dr. McCoy to the entire crew of Enterprise. "You're always on the side of, 'those guys are ...

  7. Every Star Trek Character Saved By The Transporters

    In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 4, episode 9, "Our Man Bashir", an explosion on a sabotaged Runabout left the majority of the DS9 crew suspended in the transporter buffer. In order to keep the crew alive, the station's computer was ordered to keep their patterns stable by erasing all non-essential memory. However, a power outage on the former Cardassian space station led to the crew's ...

  8. Star Trek Transporters Through the Years

    In the very first episode of Star Trek ever produced, The Cage, we saw the crew of the Starship Enterprise beam down to a strange new world, and ever since, ...

  9. How Transporters Work (Star Trek)

    Transporters are basically teleport machines, but work in a very strange way of converting matter to an energy stream and reassembling it. At least its consi...

  10. REC.ARTS.STARTREK.TECH FAQ: Transporters, Replicators and Phasing

    Star Trek has "broken" the rules of transporters a number of times. There are very few glaring examples of misuse of the transporter as a plot device to save the day, but the worst include: "Rascals" [TNG] - Picard, Keiko, Guinan and Ro are turned into children in a freak transporter accident, and later restored.

  11. In Star Trek

    The transporter 'pad' area is relatively small. As a guess, maybe 12 people can fit on it. But the vast majority of times it's being used by 2-3 people. However, the transporter is able to beam people from anywhere on the ship to anywhere (within some distance I presume). It's fairly common for them to perform a transport directly to the bridge.

  12. Star Trek's Use of Transporters, Explained

    In Star Trek: Enterprise Season 4, the inventor of the transporter, Dr. Emory Erickson visits the ship for an experiment that's a secret plan to save his son, lost in a transporter accident. During the episode, he dismisses out-of-hand the idea that the transporter "kills" the people who use it.

  13. Transporter room

    A few days later, in a brazen attack on the Enterprise-D, the Ansata planted a bomb on the main reactor chamber.Captain Picard ordered the transporter chief to lock onto the explosive device and beam it out into space.As the bomb had sensor jamming technology, the chief couldn't complete the order.It was only when Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge removed the bomb from the chamber with a laser cutter ...

  14. How Star Trek's Transporter Effect Actually Worked

    According to an article on Inverse, The Anderson Company (run in the 1960s by Darrel Anderson and Howard A. Anderson) created it in a very simple way, with "aluminum powder and old-school ...

  15. Star Trek's Transporter Technology, Explained

    Star Trek: The USS Enterprise's Best Commanding Officers, Ranked Beam Up The Best Star Trek Books In 2024 - Novels & Non-Fiction Star Trek Fan Explains The Only Way Enterprise Would Have Better

  16. transporter (Star Trek)

    The transporter is a device, first seen aboard the Starship Enterprise in the Star Trek original series, which made the concept of teleportation familiar to a wide audience. "Beam me up, Scotty" became one of the small screen's most oft-repeated lines (though trivia hunters will find that "Beam me up, Mr. Scott" is the closest the show actually came to that immortal line).

  17. How Star Trek's Transporter Effect Actually Worked

    First, they filmed the actors in a standing position, before having them move off-frame to capture the empty set — then they took a container of water against a black background and backlit it ...

  18. star trek

    In contrast, in Star Trek Enterprise, season 4, one of the marines ("MACO") is covering troops while others beam out of a firefight. He is the last to beam out, and as he is dematerializing, he takes multiple hits from an enemy energy weapon during transport which appear to pass through his body.

  19. Beam me up Scotty: German scientists invent working teleporter, of

    Star Trek's transporter sold the idea of teleportation to the masses, but now German scientists have invented a real-life working system that 'teleports' objects from one location to another ...

  20. Why Did Star Trek: Enterprise Use Shuttles?

    The two collaborated to create Star Trek: Enterprise, which moved the storytelling from the 24th Century backwards 200 years to Earth's first Warp 5 starship. While the series still had many familiar elements, Enterprise rarely used Star Trek 's iconic transporters in favor of sleek shuttles to get the characters from place-to-place.

  21. Sub-quantum transporter

    The sub-quantum transporter was a flawed technology invented by Emory Erickson and studied by the Vulcan Science Academy. It was intended to be the replacement for the transporter used in the mid-22nd century. The sub-quantum transporter would beam an object or person from planet-to-planet, or any other distance, since the device had unlimited range. The system also required much less power to ...

  22. I'm watching Star Trek Enterprise and why do they seem to ...

    The Enterprise NX 01 was the first Starfleet ship the have a transporter installed that was authorized to transport biological objects! It was rarely used to transport any of the crew because they didn't have a trust for the transporter when it came to transporting things like people yet.

  23. Every Time Star Trek's Dr. McCoy Said "I'm A Doctor, Not A…"

    When an ion storm interferes with a transporter beam to the ship through a power surge in the transporter's circuits, the USS Enterprise away team becomes trapped in a deadly parallel Mirror ...

  24. 9 Star Trek Episodes Named After Greek Myths

    Star Trek: Enterprise's "Daedalus" has several similarities with the Greek myth. The episode begins when the creator of transporter technology, Dr. Emory Erickson (Bill Cobbs) visits the ...

  25. star trek

    In Star Trek IV, they beam up four hundred tons with a Klingon transporter. ("It's not just the whales...it's the water!") ... Picard instructs the Enterprise to use "Transporter code 14" - the use of the transporter as a weapon by dematerializing an object and simply never rematerializing it. ... One of the most creative uses of a transporter ...

  26. Star Trek Characters Die in the Transporter All the Time. Why Are They

    "Beam me up, Scotty" is a quote as iconic as Star Trek's once-magical automatic doors ― even if Captain Kirk didn't actually say it.While Star Trek wasn't the first sci-fi creation to ...

  27. Star Trek: The Next Generations 'Cause and Effect' Explained

    Data withdraws his tractor beam idea and supports Riker's proposition, which allows the Enterprise to evade the oncoming vessel. The time loop ends, revealing that the crew spent 17 days in the ...

  28. The Future of 'Star Trek': From 'Starfleet Academy' to New Movies and

    Anson Mount is sitting across from me on one of the Toronto soundstages for the Paramount+ series "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," which is set in the years when his character, Capt. Christopher Pike, led the legendary Federation starship with a young Spock and Uhura.We're speaking on the sleek Enterprise bridge, and Mount is recounting the out-of-body experience he had the first time he ...

  29. The 'Star Trek' Episode That Was Banned Overseas for ...

    In the 23rd Century, Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets.

  30. Star Trek's Strongest Supporting Women Characters

    While the Star Trek franchise reached its pinnacle with Kate Mulgrew's fantastic portrayal of Captain Janeway, it began earlier with the truly revolutionary casting of Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura. While one can nitpick and say she was subservient to the boys (and there's definitely an argument to be made), the very fact that an African American woman was seen on the Bridge had a direct ...