Riker was split during the process, since the person doing the teleporter thing did an ill-advised/unprecedented thing and basically tried to transport them twice simultaneously, using two transport beams, and reintegrate the patterns later, so that the interference didn’t cause them to lose too much of him, and they had enough to use the pattern repair mechanisms to patch any gaps (more than 50% lost is generally considered unrecoverable).
Part of the interference resulted in one of the transport beams being echoed down to the planet surface, and the transporter presumably did its best to fill in the gaps so that they didn’t just get half a Riker, and they ended up with two whole Rikers instead.
If it was a simple clone -> store -> kill/replicate, Scotty wouldn’t have needed some whole convoluted song and dance to keep someone in the buffer for decades, and Franklin’d not have died.
It does beg the question of whether you could intentionally do it. Scotty was very limited by the technology available to him, but the later versions of the Enterprise might have been able. It’s interesting to think about. All of that said, I think you support your position very well and I appreciate the thoughtful response!
Hm, in theory, possibly, but not by doing Scotty’s method, since that was basically constantly redoing the transport over, and over internally, without actually materialising the pattern. DS9 has transport patterns moved into regular computer storage, but the requirements were considerable. 5 people required the combined computer storage capacity of the entire station.
If you can do that, it doesn’t seem impossible to copy the pattern itself using the computer, feed the copy right into the transporter, then materialise the copied pattern. As far as the transporter is concerned, you’re just transporting the same thing a whole bunch, loading the patterns into the buffer from a different device.
You would need more than just a transporter to achieve that, though.
What about the Rikers?
Riker was split during the process, since the person doing the teleporter thing did an ill-advised/unprecedented thing and basically tried to transport them twice simultaneously, using two transport beams, and reintegrate the patterns later, so that the interference didn’t cause them to lose too much of him, and they had enough to use the pattern repair mechanisms to patch any gaps (more than 50% lost is generally considered unrecoverable).
Part of the interference resulted in one of the transport beams being echoed down to the planet surface, and the transporter presumably did its best to fill in the gaps so that they didn’t just get half a Riker, and they ended up with two whole Rikers instead.
If it was a simple clone -> store -> kill/replicate, Scotty wouldn’t have needed some whole convoluted song and dance to keep someone in the buffer for decades, and Franklin’d not have died.
It does beg the question of whether you could intentionally do it. Scotty was very limited by the technology available to him, but the later versions of the Enterprise might have been able. It’s interesting to think about. All of that said, I think you support your position very well and I appreciate the thoughtful response!
Hm, in theory, possibly, but not by doing Scotty’s method, since that was basically constantly redoing the transport over, and over internally, without actually materialising the pattern. DS9 has transport patterns moved into regular computer storage, but the requirements were considerable. 5 people required the combined computer storage capacity of the entire station.
If you can do that, it doesn’t seem impossible to copy the pattern itself using the computer, feed the copy right into the transporter, then materialise the copied pattern. As far as the transporter is concerned, you’re just transporting the same thing a whole bunch, loading the patterns into the buffer from a different device.
You would need more than just a transporter to achieve that, though.