While I love TNG (even though the cast can’t shut up) and that was the first Star Trek I was familiar with since I was 6 and a fan of reading rainbow when it came out I would say that the original series is my favorite (can happily watch Trek through Enterprise). My dad watched Original Series reruns since as long as I can remember.
The sendoff for the original crew always gets to to me and it just contrast that with writers today who live to crap on or deconstruct the works of better writers. I saw they are making a new blade runner with a delusional man, Disney is making a new Neverending Story, and Netflix is butchering… I mean remaking the Chronicles of Narnia.
One good thing about Star Trek is that I have a lot of books to read. I was at a convention once and a guy had a bunch of Star Trek books for a quarter a piece so I left with a bunch.
The transporter isn't a xerox. It's more like shipping ikea furniture. Your matter is broken down, then moved along an energy beam to the destination, where the same matter is reassembled in the same pattern.
That's what it's supposed to be, at least. Different writers all handle tech slightly differently. It shouldn't be possible to get a transporter clone, like what happened with Riker. The tech doesn't work that way, unless it does this week.
I suppose I'd just assumed that in some sense the entire molecular makeup of a person was scanned and more or less converted into data throughout the process. I suppose I haven't revisited the idea in a very long time though.
Hadn't given any thought into the actual "beam" portion of the functional idea, which does change the concept quite a bit. Not sure if I'd say if it's more realistic, but it does hinge on a very different kind of implementation than I'd been assuming.
To be fair, the writers get really lazy with it and it's really inconsistent.
I think the idea of a particle stream is actually a lot more realistic than matter-energy-matter conversion because a particle beam would cost less energy.
I don't like the reading that a ridiculous amount of Federation tech is constantly doing matter-energy conversions. For example, the replicators being synthesizers that take in matter and rearrange it strikes me as way more likely than every bedroom having an energy-matter converter.
I always figured that it was the ultimate garbage recycler. Takes garbage, breaks it down into atoms/molecules, and then rebuilds those particles into whatever it is you want - a guitar or an ice cream sundae. That would totally explain the "utopia" that they supposedly experience.
What gets me is, if they have that, why does Picard have a commercial-sized vinyard? Sure, I could see people growing stuff for "real food", but you'd only need - and be able to work - so much. If you wanted help, you'd have to search out people who are willing to be paid in wine, and well, then you've got a goddamn commune, but you're not going to be able to sell to anyone outside of said commune (not like you'd need to.) And really, you can get a lot of wine out of a standard back yard (of the sort I grew up with, anyway, lots of Italians grew their own grapes. Us kids used to cruise the alleys to nick anything growing outside of a fence ...)
A piece of lore that fell by the wayside is that replicated food doesn't taste right. It's a necessity in space where storage is at a premium, but it's not a universal solution and wherever possible, real food is preferred.
I can't speak to the size of Picard's vineyard. You can definitely hand wave some with "automation", as unsatisfying as that is.
Yeah it's not really more realistic, it just sidesteps the philosophical question about transporter clones. Interestingly the ST-TNG technical manual includes both references to matter-energy conversion, and "feedstock" containers of molecules for replication. In the show itself they've also described wacky mixups between the transporter pattern buffer and the replicator, allowing the transporter to create new things. That's not even getting into the holodeck and how crazy those episodes could get.