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I was watching TNG's "Reunion" the other day, and while I understood that K'Ehleyr's death was dramatically necessary, I thought that deaths like that should be largely preventable in Trek, given existing technology. So, I thought it might be a fun/interesting exercise to combine some exiting Trek technologies/gadgets to solve a problem or shortcoming. As I mentioned, mine has to do with traumatic injuries aboard starships/space stations.

Existing technologies:

1. Medical Stasis - If someone is traumatically injured, it is apparently within the capabilities of TNG-era Trek to place that person in medical stasis, to prevent the person from dying while treatment/surgery is prepared. The first example of use of this that leaps to my mind is in TNG's "Genesis", where Crusher gets a faceful of Worf's proto-Klingon death loogie: Nurse Ogawa is able to quickly put her into stasis to halt further damage to her face and to prepare adequately for reconstructive surgery. I'm sure other examples of this can be found throughout the various series. Note that it doesn't seem to work for non-traumatic injury, like that disease that little kid had in "Brothers," or whatever Riker had in "Shades of Grey."
2. Isolinear tags - We famously see these in ST:I, when the Sona are tagging and beaming away the Baku as they flee into the mountains.

So, combining the two, we have...

The Emergency Medical Stasis Tag!

Deep in the bowels of a starship of your choice, a team of engineers is working on a power conduit, attempting to seal a small breach that occurred earlier in the day. The inattentive dick of an Ensign who was supposed to ensure that the safety locks were in place, so that it would totally impossible for main Engineering to re-route power through the conduit while they were working, simply told his buddy back in main Engineering to divert power from the conduit until he calls him. Well, shift change! The replacement for the Ensign's buddy has no idea what's going on with this power conduit, because the safety locks were never engaged. Main Engineering gets a request from the bridge to increase power to the lateral sensor array, and it just happens that they have an available power conduit to do just that!

The explosion is small, as far as these things go, because the computer override cuts power after just a few thousandths of a second. However, two of the five crew are nonetheless horrifically injured: burns, shrapnel wounds, the full nine. If they're not dead, they will be in a minute or two. Rather than calling for a medical team, or an emergency beamout, one of the able-bodied crew members runs to one of the ubiquitous medical lockers, pulls out the Stasis Tag Kit, and runs back. She slaps a tag on both of the injured crewmembers, then activates them with the Kit's controller. The ship's transporters immediately activate, beaming the two crewmembers into stasis chambers, where automatic processes quickly induce stasis and alert Sickbay to prepare for emergency surgery.

Caveats: I thought I'd point out that this setup makes a few assumptions. First, that medical stasis is a largely automatic process, and that realistically, the only thing you have to do is shove someone into the chamber for it to take effect. Given that most of Trek medicine seems to be practiced with hyposprays and little dongles on the forehead, I don't think this is too farfetched as to be considered impractical or beyond Trek's means. Second, I assume that the burden of transport is on the ship or facility, which places the point of failure at what seems to be a pretty fickle system. Honestly, the isolinear tags could be replaced with those one-way transporter things from Nemesis, but I went with the tags because I figured they'd be easier to mass-produce. It appears that just about every ship and station has transporters, so they could integrate across the fleet fairly easily.

So, I invite you to give it a shot. Combine some existing Trek technology into a new application, which could be used to solve a shortcoming of tech in the Trekverse. The problem could be silly or deadly serious--whatever floats your boat.

Phaser + Universal Translator:

Anytime a universal translator detects a specific language, say Talaxian, it will activate a phaser to destroy the speaker.

Better use of the Medical Statis Transport tag would be to combine it further with medical monitoring systems. The INSTANT you are seriously injured, your ass in in stasis and awaiting medical treatment.

Conbine the isolinear tag with a hand-phaser set to stun. When a security officer fires on someone, they get stunned, tagged, and immediately transported to a holding cell in the brig. Interestingly, the pirates from "Gambit" actually used weapons that worked much like that (it was mostly an "informed ability", but Picard, at least, was apparently captured that way).

Combine a medical tricorder with a communicator. If the wearer experiences some sort of serious medical emergency, they're immediately transported to a hospital.

Combine a tricorder with a hand-phaser. A tricorder can already identify species by life signs, and it should be able to determine distance and direction. Just rig it so that if the trigger is depressed and a the first life sign in the path from the emitter is a viable target, the beam discharges. The Federation actually could achieve something resembling "perfect accuracy" (within limits of range and tricorder precision, of course); they just don't. Maybe it would be too damned expensive.

Combine the ability of the ships to keep track of the crew with the ability to trigger a red alert. A person suddenly disappears? Red Alert. Kid not where they are supposed to be? Shut down the section. Etc.

I'd combine the mechanism that allows a transporter to identify and deactivate an energy weapon with the method of storing a transported object or person in the pattern buffer. If someone is beamed aboard who has a weapon, or even just the power source for one, it's deactivated and removed from him before the transport cycle finishes. At the discretion of certain high-ranking officers (Captain, First Officer, Chief of Security) the item can be reactivated and/or returned. With weapons that have no such power source, they can simply be confiscated.

CDiehl wrote:I'd combine the mechanism that allows a transporter to identify and deactivate an energy weapon with the method of storing a transported object or person in the pattern buffer. If someone is beamed aboard who has a weapon, or even just the power source for one, it's deactivated and removed from him before the transport cycle finishes. At the discretion of certain high-ranking officers (Captain, First Officer, Chief of Security) the item can be reactivated and/or returned. With weapons that have no such power source, they can simply be confiscated.

This exists. Sisko, and I think, Kirk, used it. writeup. Amusing picture.

NecronLord wrote:

CDiehl wrote:I'd combine the mechanism that allows a transporter to identify and deactivate an energy weapon with the method of storing a transported object or person in the pattern buffer. If someone is beamed aboard who has a weapon, or even just the power source for one, it's deactivated and removed from him before the transport cycle finishes. At the discretion of certain high-ranking officers (Captain, First Officer, Chief of Security) the item can be reactivated and/or returned. With weapons that have no such power source, they can simply be confiscated.

This exists. Sisko, and I think, Kirk, used it. writeup. Amusing picture.

O'Brien just a variant on Data in The Most Toys, switching off a firing weapon mid-transport:

O'BRIEN
I'm reading a weapon in transit
with Commander Data. It seems
to have discharged, sir.

RIKER
Discharged... ?

O'BRIEN
I'm deactivating the weapon.

In an uber-safety conscious world like Trek's, I'm surprised that weapons aren't just automatically beamed back into the armory when a mission is complete, and beamed back into the Redshirt's hands when he goes down to a planet.

Samuel wrote:Combine the ability of the ships to keep track of the crew with the ability to trigger a red alert. A person suddenly disappears? Red Alert. Kid not where they are supposed to be? Shut down the section. Etc.

This would easy to implement as well as practical. HOW MANY TIMES does a crew member get kidnapped by aliens and nobody finds out about it until hours later?

Multi-phasic tractor beams.

Suppose you need to tow away a beat-up ship or divert the trajectory of a rogue comet. A regular tractor beam can only grip an object with a solid constitution, not compromised structural integrity. A regular tractor would rip off hull plating from the ship, and chunks of ice from the comet.

A tractor with phasic technology would lock-on not only the surface of the object, but successive layers within.

Enola Straight wrote:Suppose you need to tow away a beat-up ship or divert the trajectory of a rogue comet. A regular tractor beam can only grip an object with a solid constitution, not compromised structural integrity. A regular tractor would rip off hull plating from the ship, and chunks of ice from the comet.

What evidence do you have for tractor beams having that flaw in the first place? Certainly that's not how they're supposed to work in the fluff (TNG tech manual). The Enterprise has tractored unpowered derelicts (e.g. the Stargazer) and normal asteroids without any such problems. Even if they did, how does 'multi-phasic' i.e. changing the modulation pattern of the beam equate to more penetration?

Enola Straight wrote:Multi-phasic tractor beams.

Suppose you need to tow away a beat-up ship or divert the trajectory of a rogue comet. A regular tractor beam can only grip an object with a solid constitution, not compromised structural integrity. A regular tractor would rip off hull plating from the ship, and chunks of ice from the comet.

A tractor with phasic technology would lock-on not only the surface of the object, but successive layers within.

Multi-phased tractor beams used in this episode.

montypython wrote:

Enola Straight wrote:Multi-phasic tractor beams.

Suppose you need to tow away a beat-up ship or divert the trajectory of a rogue comet. A regular tractor beam can only grip an object with a solid constitution, not compromised structural integrity. A regular tractor would rip off hull plating from the ship, and chunks of ice from the comet.

A tractor with phasic technology would lock-on not only the surface of the object, but successive layers within.

Multi-phased tractor beams used in this episode.

Yes, they used a multi-phase tractor beam in "The Masterpiece Society", but the problem wasn't the structural integrity of the object they needed to move: the stellar core fragment was quite solid. The problem was that ordinarily the tractor beam emitters would quickly break down if the amount of power needed to change the course of the core fragment were routed through them. The "multi-phase" business was a technobabble way of getting around the physical limitations of the emitters, not the instability of the target.

This exists. Sisko, and I think, Kirk, used it.

I hadn't remembered about Transport Protocol 5. However, what I described does this to every weapon on someone's person, not just the obvious one in his hand. Also, it's meant to be automatic, with a high-ranking officer having to order the items reconstructed on the pad.

O'Brien just a variant on Data in The Most Toys, switching off a firing weapon mid-transport:

I know. That's what the first half of my combination is. However, it's not just blocking a weapon being fired as the transport begins. It not only deactivates the weapon, it takes it out of the person's possession entirely. The person appears on the pad unarmed, with no weapons hidden anywhere on him.

In addition, I imagine this idea could be combined with the ship's internal sensors to disarm anyone who comes into possession of a weapon despite all security procedures to the contrary. Next time a boarding party comes aboard, their weapons are taken away once they can be scanned.

Subspace Rebound Transport + Any warhead.

Subspace Rebound Transport was used in the episode 'the Seige'. Terrorist kidnap Dr. Crusher. Back then, the Tech Manuals were still canon.

Pichard ordered a Red Alert when the boarding action by the terrorist started. That automatically caused the shields to raise. Yet the terrorist kept getting on board, and leaving the ship, without problem.

So, put that into a warhead, and have it bypass enemy shields.

Warhead is about to hit shields, jumps past them, then slams into enemy ship. Enemy ship gets hammed, hard.

Solauren wrote:Warhead is about to hit shields, jumps past them, then slams into enemy ship. Enemy ship gets hammed, hard.

Wouldn't it be better to just transport the warhead into or close to the enemy ship?

Combine a standard communicator badge with one of those medical tricorder saltshaker and have a constant link with the medical computer. (actually shown in neoTrek with the Captain of the Kelvin) The moment you are injured or have a heart attack [because your holoporn was too much for you] and you get transported to the next sickbay. And everyone will know if you get abducted by green skinned space amazons.

Kirk's torn shirt+Replicators

Lets face facts, you would make Starfleet the ultimate power in the universe.

Actually, the combination I would want has already been used IIRC, which is weapons+transporter buffer patterns.

Solauren wrote:Subspace Rebound Transport + Any warhead.

Subspace Rebound Transport was used in the episode 'the Seige'. Terrorist kidnap Dr. Crusher. Back then, the Tech Manuals were still canon.

Did this episode have a different title where you're from? The title was "The High Ground", and the Rutians called the device an "inverter", not a "rebound transporter".

Nonetheless, it did get the terrorists through the ship's shields easily enough, and the control devices also kept the Enterprise from being able to lock onto them with transporters. The system caused cell damage with repeated use, but there's certainly no reason it couldn't be used to send an inanimate object onto a shielded ship.

Ted C wrote:

Solauren wrote:Subspace Rebound Transport + Any warhead.

Subspace Rebound Transport was used in the episode 'the Seige'. Terrorist kidnap Dr. Crusher. Back then, the Tech Manuals were still canon.

Did this episode have a different title where you're from? The title was "The High Ground", and the Rutians called the device an "inverter", not a "rebound transporter".

Nonetheless, it did get the terrorists through the ship's shields easily enough, and the control devices also kept the Enterprise from being able to lock onto them with transporters. The system caused cell damage with repeated use, but there's certainly no reason it couldn't be used to send an inanimate object onto a shielded ship.

Whoops, my bad on the names. But the terrorist called it the Invertor. Wesley ID'ed it as the other tech.

Another merged tech;
Holograms and Shields/Cloaking Device.
"What do you have on sensors?"
"Oh, it's just an asteroid...."
(Transport on a warhead....)

Solauren wrote: Holograms and Shields/Cloaking Device.
"What do you have on sensors?"
"Oh, it's just an asteroid...."
(Transport on a warhead....)

I am not sure but I always thought that is what the ST Cloak was a trick of shield and Holo-tech. At least it would help explain why both can not be use at the same time, except for a few ships, where most other reasons fall into stupidity.

Shields and cloaks/holographs being mutually exclusive I can sort of see. Both rely on forcefield technology and might interfere with each other on top of the cloak power drain (IIRC the standard explanation for why they usually can't fire while cloaked).

Use the Sona drones with transporter tags. Combine them with a transporter system that automatically transports a grenade right next to the person just tagged. You can start taking out large groups of people this way.

You can do that by simply firing shipboard weapons at the tag's location.
Of course people exposed to So'na drones would be exposed to orbital/aerial observation already so one wonders why to bother with the drones in the first place if the only point is to blow them up anyway.

So that, even underground or inside, even in bunkers or mile deep tunnels, Federation justice will still kill you- with negligable damage to your surroundings as well.