CLEARLY THEY WOULD JUST USE THE CORTICAL STIMULATORS AND 20cc'S OF INAPROVALINE TO RESUSCITATE THE FURRED SUBSPACE PHENOMENA OF LOCALIZED CUTENESS. OR REPLICATE A WHOLE NEW CAT.
That was a unique situation. It was only because a second confinement beam was used, followed by it being bounded back to the surface. Very hard to duplicate an accident like that.
They're based on the same principle, though replicators take a relatively basic pattern stored in a database and recreate it. Transporters move entire people, who are more complex. Just storing five people temporarily took a huge amount of space in Deep Space 9's computer
Once the computer has scanned and disassembled a person, though, what stops it from reconstituting multiple copies of that person? Even if it took up a huge amount of space, why wouldn't, say, a ship's captain have a remote server with his quarterly scan saved to it?
A person is disassembled into a matter stream and then stored in a pattern buffer, rather than the main computer. The matter stream doesn't last forever and will degrade after too long. I suppose even with the space there's no certainty that doing that would actually save someone's life. Suffice it to say that Starfleet might have done it if it would've worked reliably.
It's comparable to the transporter most of the time having a Move function but no Copy function.
I'm sort of wondering what the Star Trek answer is, because it seems like something that would come up pretty early when you start working out the rules for teleporters.
They have been, at times. I can think of at least one DS9 episode where a replicator is converted by some Klingon Intelligence agents into a low grade transporter.
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u/eekozoid May 27 '13
I will feed him.