AFAIK the hand-wave for transporters is that it’s not a disintegration ray slash 3D printer with a file transfer in-between. It’s space magic. You are physically moved from one location to the next.
Because the implications of anything else are both fucked-up beyond measure and exploitable in miraculous ways. Consistent recognition of fan arguments for how it should work would drastically change what kind of science fiction Star Trek is. As soon as you can “restore from backup,” death ceases to matter. Have as many Tashas Yar as you please. Feed 'em all to the goo monster, see if that calms it down. Or don’t: crank out Soong androids by the ship-full. Duplicate your chief engineer so they both have time to sleep. Let your captain’s Number One be Number Two.
But that’s not conducive to horror-tinged moral dilemmas among naval officers, so it doesn’t work. The minovsky particles interfere with the anti-cavorite deck plating through wibbly wobbly timey wimey shut up. Shut up is why.
Even though writers make exceptions all the damn time. Even Stargate, which is all explicitly done with wormholes and the literal physical transport of your actual material body, has episodes like “48 Hours” that are straight-up transporter-buffer scripts. Even guest-stars John de Lancie.
AFAIK the hand-wave for transporters is that it’s not a disintegration ray slash 3D printer with a file transfer in-between. It’s space magic. You are physically moved from one location to the next.
Because the implications of anything else are both fucked-up beyond measure and exploitable in miraculous ways. Consistent recognition of fan arguments for how it should work would drastically change what kind of science fiction Star Trek is. As soon as you can “restore from backup,” death ceases to matter. Have as many Tashas Yar as you please. Feed 'em all to the goo monster, see if that calms it down. Or don’t: crank out Soong androids by the ship-full. Duplicate your chief engineer so they both have time to sleep. Let your captain’s Number One be Number Two.
But that’s not conducive to horror-tinged moral dilemmas among naval officers, so it doesn’t work. The minovsky particles interfere with the anti-cavorite deck plating through wibbly wobbly timey wimey shut up. Shut up is why.
Even though writers make exceptions all the damn time. Even Stargate, which is all explicitly done with wormholes and the literal physical transport of your actual material body, has episodes like “48 Hours” that are straight-up transporter-buffer scripts. Even guest-stars John de Lancie.