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It is doubtful that transporters truly convert matter to energy anyway. If they do, then it would not be possible to generate two Rikers from one, since there isn't enough energy in the stream to do it.

As for "subspace tears", there is no reason to believe that the quantity of energy in the "subspace domain" is significant, for the simple reason that objects and even people are not harmed by being submerged into it.

Connor MacLeod wrote:They have "quantum" torpedoes that supposedly tap ZPE.. yet for some reason their ships do not appear to be capable of using this effect. I would have thought that had they any other methods of tapping energy like that, Q-torps wouldn't be so phenomenal.

Seems similar to fusion. We have thermonuclear weapons, but no fusion reactors that work.

There isn't that much ZPE really out there anyway. W/ how pathetic current photon torpedoes are, they should just replace them w/ easy to store nukes and make bigger torpedoes that carry decent amounts of M/AM, instead of the tennis balls they shoot now w/ only 2 lbs or something in them.

MoO, could you explain how we could get a cosmic string in the first place? I read in The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene that a black hole is actually a huge elementary particle and a closed cosmic string.

jaeger115 wrote:MoO, could you explain how we could get a cosmic string in the first place? I read in The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene that a black hole is actually a huge elementary particle and a closed cosmic string.

We can't get a cosmic string, it was idle speculation on what COULD create more energy than M/AM. Assuming that you could generate something like that (or, find them and use them) then it would be orders of magnitude better than M/AM, but the fact of the matter is that we cannot possibly get anything like that.

A black hole is not a cosmic string, although it is sometimes seen as a huge elementary particle. It is not as dense as the cosmic strings that some scientists and physicists now theorize exist.

Durandal wrote:

Patrick Degan wrote:If the transporter is dematerialising anything, it's doing work. It's already using energy for that particular process, which rather defeats the entire purpose of utilising it as any sort of power generator. At best, all you could accomplish is for the system to fuel its own process, and again, you gain nothing.

That's a lot like saying it's pointless to build a fusion bomb because you have to initiate the reaction with a fission trigger. If, somehow, the transporter can be used to gain orders of magnitude more energy than its expenditure, it would be prudent to investigate.

The analogy is flawed. The difference is that the energy in a thermonuclear device is already locked up within its reaction material, awaiting release. It requires no more work than to set off the initial fission chain-reaction, which in turn raises the temperatures and pressures within the bomb's core to what's required to initiate fusion in the D/T (or lithium-6 deuteride) fuel, which in turn releases a large enough quantity of free, fast neutrons to initiate fission in the U-238 tamper. But the energy is already present; stored within the bomb's reaction mass.

You cannot have this with a transporter, because you have to power up the unit in the first place, expend energy in scanning and patterning, then it must do work in order to actually dematerialise solid matter. It's a net loss process no matter how you look at it. You're not gaining anything more than what you put in, and you wouldn't even get that back.